Featured
Briefing

A
Holographic
Universe?

Are we actually
living in a
holographic
universe? Are the
distant galaxies
only a virtual
illusion? In a
hologram, distances
are synthetic! How
does this impact our
concepts of time and
space?

There seems to
be growing evidence
to suggest that our
world and everything
in it may be only
ghostly images,
projections from a
level of reality so
beyond our own that
the real
reality is literally
beyond both space
and time.1

The Cosmos As a
Super-Hologram?

An initiating
architect of this
astonishing idea was
one of the world’s
most eminent
thinkers: University
of London physicist
David Bohm, a
protégé of
Einstein’s and one
of the world’s most
respected
quantum
physicists. Bohm’s
work in
plasma physics
in the 1950s is
considered a
landmark. Earlier,
at the
Lawrence Radiation
Laboratory, he
noticed that in
plasmas (ionized
gases) the particles
stopped behaving as
individuals and
started behaving as
if they were part of
a larger and
interconnected
whole. Moving to
Princeton University
in 1947, there, too,
he continued his
work in the behavior
of oceans of ionized
particles, noting
their highly
organized overall
effects and their
behavior, as if they
knew what each of
the untold trillions
of individual
particles was doing.

One of the
implications of
Bohm’s view has to
do with the nature
of
location.
Bohm’s
interpretation of
quantum physics
indicated that at
the subquantum level
location ceased
to exist. All
points in space
become equal to all
other points in
space, and it was
meaningless to speak
of anything as being
separate from
anything else.
Physicists call this
property “nonlocality”.
The web of subatomic
particles that
compose our physical
universe—the very
fabric of “reality”
itself—possesses
what appears to be
an undeniable
“holographic”
property. Paul Davis
of the
University of
Newcastle upon Tyne,
England, observed
that since all
particles are
continually
interacting and
separating, “the
nonlocal aspects of
quantum systems is
therefore a general
property of nature.”2

The Nature of
Reality

One of Bohm’s
most startling
suggestions was that
the tangible reality
of our everyday
lives is really a
kind of illusion,
like a holographic
image. Underlying it
is a deeper order of
existence, a vast
and more primary
level of reality
that gives birth to
all the objects and
appearances of our
physical world in
much the same way
that a piece of
holographic film
gives birth to a
hologram. Bohm calls
this deeper level of
reality the
implicate
(“enfolded”) order
and he refers to our
level of existence
the
explicate (unfolded)
order.3
This view is not
inconsistent with
the Biblical
presentation of the
physical
(“explicate”) world
as being subordinate
to the spiritual
(“implicate”) world
as the superior
reality.4

GEO 600 is a
gravitational wave
detector located
near Sarstedt,
Germany, which seeks
to detect
gravitational waves
by means of a laser
interferometer
of 600 meter arms’
length. This
instrument, and its
sister
interferometric
detectors, are some
of the most
sensitive
gravitational wave
detectors ever
designed. They are
designed to detect
relative changes in
distance of the
order of 10-21,
about the size
of a single atom
compared to the
distance from the
Earth to the Sun!
Construction on the
project began in
1995.

Mystery Noise

On January 15,
2009, it was
reported in
New Scientist
that some yet
unidentified noise
that was present in
the GEO 600 detector
measurements might
be because the
instrument is
sensitive to
extremely small
quantum fluctuations
of
space-time
affecting the
positions of parts
of the detector.
This claim was made
by
Craig Hogan, a
scientist from
Fermilab, on the
basis of his theory
of how such
fluctuations should
occur motivated by
the holographic
principle.5Apparently, the
gravitational wave
detector in Hannover
may have detected
evidence for a
holographic
Universe!

Gravitational
Wave Observatories
Join Forces

A number of
major projects will
now pool their data
to analyze it,
jointly boosting
their chances of
spotting a faint
signal that might
otherwise be hidden
by detector noise.
Using lasers, they
measure the length
between mirrored
test masses hung
inside tunnels at
right angles to each
other. Gravitational
waves decrease the
distance between the
masses in one tunnel
and increase it in
the other by a tiny,
but detectable
amount. Combining
the data will also
make it possible to
triangulate to find
the source of any
gravitational waves
detected. These
include:
Laser Interferometer
Gravitational
Observatory
based in Hanford,
Washington and
Livingston,
Louisiana;
Virgo Observatory,
Pisa Italy; and, of
course, the GEO 600
Observatory near
Hanover, Germany.

The most
ambitious of them is
the
Laser Interferometer
Space Antenna (LISA),
a joint mission
between
NASA and the
European Space
Agency to
develop and operate
a space-based
gravitational wave
detector sensitive
at frequencies
between 0.03 mHz and
0.1 Hz. LISA seeks
to detect
gravitational-wave
induced strains in
space-time by
measuring changes of
the separation
between fiducial
masses in three
spacecraft 5 million
kilometers apart.

Cosmic
Implications

Are we
actually living in a
holographic
universe? Are the
distant galaxies
only a virtual
illusion? In a
hologram,
distances are
synthetic!
How does this impact
our concepts of time
and space?

It gets even
worse: Could our
universe be
geocentric? The
implications are too
staggering to
embrace. The
holographic paradigm
is still a
developing concept
and riddled with
controversies. For
decades, science has
chosen to ignore
evidences that do
not fit their
standard theories.
However, the volume
of evidence has now
reached the point
that denial is no
longer a viable
option.

Clearly, 20th-century
science has
discovered that our
“macrocosm”—studies
of largeness—is
finite, not
infinite. Our
universe is finite
and had a beginning,
and that’s what has
led to the “big
bang”
speculations. We
also realize that
gravity is
dramatically
eclipsed by
electromagnetic
considerations when
dealing with
galaxies, etc. The
plasma physicists
have been trying to
tell astronomers
that for decades but
no one was
listening.

What is even
more shocking has
been the discoveries
in the
“microcosm”—studies
of smallness—that
run up against the “Planck
Wall” of the
non-location of
subatomic particles,
and the many strange
paradoxes of quantum
physics. We now
discover that we are
in a virtual reality
that is a digital,
simulated
environment. The
bizarre realization
that the “constants”
of physics are
changing indicates
that our “reality”
is “but a shadow of
a larger reality,”6
and that’s what the
Bible has maintained
all along!7

The Bible is,
of course, unique in
that it has always
presented a universe
of more than three
dimensions,8
and revealed a
Creator that is
transcendent
over His creation.
It is the only “holy
book” that
demonstrates these
contemporary
insights. It’s time
for us to spend more
time with the
handbook that the
Creator has handed
to us. It is the
ultimate adventure,
indeed!

For background
information on the
Holographic
Universe, see our
briefing series,
The Beyond
Collection,
available on DVD and
other formats, in
the Christmas
catalog insert in
this issue.

Notes

We
explore
the
limitations
of the
Macrocosm,
the
Microcosm,
and the
super-embracing
“Metacosm”
in our
Beyond
Series.

Paul
Davis,
Superforce,
Simon &
Schuster,
New
York,
1948,
p.48.

This is
reminiscent
of the
Red
King’s
dream in
Through
the
Looking
Glass,
in which
Alice
finds
herself
in deep
metaphysical
waters
when the
Tweedle
brothers
defend
the view
that all
material
objects,
including
ourselves,
are only
“sorts
of
things”
in the
mind of
God.

Fermi
National
Accelerator
Laboratory
(Fermilab),
located
just
outside
Batavia,
Illinois,
near
Chicago,
is a US
Department
of
Energy
national
laboratory
specializing
in
high-energy
particle
physics.
(Craig
Hogan
was then
put in
charge…)

Scientific
American,
June
2005,
“The
Inconstancy
of
Constants”.

Hebrews
11:3;
John
1:1-3;
et al.

Ephesians
3:18.
Nachmonides,
writing
in the
13th
century,
concluded,
from his
studies
of the
Genesis
texts,
that our
universe
has ten
dimensions,
of which
only
four are
directly
“knowable”.

New Delhi, India (SPX) Feb
18, 2015
Beijing's significant military
advance has been furthered with
its venture into hypersonic
weapons systems. China is
working on hypersonic cruise
missiles for which it is working
on scramjet engines and also on
Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV).
In 2014, Beijing has conducted
three test-firings of its HGV,
the Wu-14. The first test-firing
was conducted in January, while
the second one was con

Washington (UPI) Feb 19, 2015
On Friday, astronauts aboard the
International Space Station will
initiate the station's first
reassembly in several years. The
station will be reconfigured to
create two new docking ports for
the space taxis NASA hopes to
have launched by the end of 2017
as part of its Commercial Crew
program. The first of three
assembly spacewalks will be
conducted on Friday by NASA
astronauts Barry W

St. Louis MO (SPX) Feb 18,
2015
We're so used murder mysteries
that we don't even notice how
mystery authors play with time.
Typically the murder occurs well
before the midpoint of the book,
but there is an information
blackout at that point and the
reader learns what happened then
only on the last page. If the
last page were ripped out of the
book, physicist Kater Murch,
PhD, said, would the reader be
better off guessin

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Feb 20,
2015
Simulations by researchers at
Tokyo Institute of Technology
and Tsinghua University indicate
that Earth-like planets are more
likely to be found orbiting
Sun-like stars rather than
lower-mass stars that are
currently targeted, in terms of
water contents of planets. The
search for habitable planets
currently focuses on so-called M
dwarfs - stars with less than
half the mass of the Sun. Thes

Boston MA (SPX) Feb 20, 2015
Every massive galaxy has a black
hole at its center, and the
heftier the galaxy, the bigger
its black hole. But why are the
two related? After all, the
black hole is millions of times
smaller and less massive than
its home galaxy. A new study of
football-shaped collections of
stars called elliptical galaxies
provides new insights into the
connection between a galaxy and
its black hole. It

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 20,
2015
Starburst galaxies transmute gas
into new stars at a dizzying
pace - up to 1,000 times faster
than typical spiral galaxies
like the Milky Way. To help
understand why some galaxies
"burst" while others do not, an
international team of
astronomers used the Atacama
Large Millimeter/submillimeter
Array (ALMA) to dissect a
cluster of star-forming clouds
at the heart of NGC 253, one of
the nearest sta

Oxnard CA (SPX) Feb 20, 2015
From its orbit 930,000 miles
above Earth, the Planck space
telescope spent more than four
years detecting the oldest light
in the universe, called the
cosmic microwave background.
This fossil from the Big Bang
fills every square inch of the
sky and offers a glimpse of what
the universe looked like almost
14 billion years ago, when it
was just 380,000 years old.
Planck's observations of thi

Paris (SPX) Feb 20, 2015
Some pairs of stars consist of
two normal stars with slightly
different masses. When the star
of slightly higher mass ages and
expands to become a red giant,
material is transferred to other
star and ends up surrounding
both stars in a huge gaseous
envelope. When this cloud
disperses the two move closer
together and form a very tight
pair with one white dwarf , and
one more normal star [1].

Boston MA (SPX) Feb 20, 2015
On Oct. 8, 2013, an explosion on
the sun's surface sent a
supersonic blast wave of solar
wind out into space. This
shockwave tore past Mercury and
Venus, blitzing by the moon
before streaming toward Earth.
The shockwave struck a massive
blow to the Earth's magnetic
field, setting off a magnetized
sound pulse around the planet.
NASA's Van Allen Probes, twin
spacecraft orbiting within the
ra

Leioa, Spain (SPX) Feb 20,
2015
In the thin, cold, dry
atmosphere of Mars the winds
blow and raise the dust from the
surface to an altitude of about
50 km. In its core thin clouds
of ice and carbon dioxide
crystallites are formed; they
are the main component of the
Martian atmosphere which on
occasions can reach, at the
most, altitudes of about 100 km.
Spacecraft orbiting Mars have
taken photos of the suspended
dust and the hi

Granada, Spain (SPX) Feb 20,
2015
The birth of planetary nebulae,
resulting from the death of low
and intermediate mass stars, is
usually thought of as a slow
process, in contrast with the
intense supernovae that massive
stars produce. But a recent
study led by researchers at the
Institute of Astrophysics of
Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) in
collaboration with the Center
for Astrobiology (CAB,
CSIC/INTA) has revealed the fact
that explosi

Paris (ESA) Feb 20, 2015
Plumes seen reaching high above
the surface of Mars are causing
a stir among scientists studying
the atmosphere on the Red
Planet. On two separate
occasions in March and April
2012, amateur astronomers
reported definite plume-like
features developing on the
planet. The plumes were seen
rising to altitudes of over 250
km above the same region of Mars
on both occasions. By
comparison, simila

Moscow, Russia (Sputnik) Feb
20, 2015
One hundred people from around
the world have been shortlisted
for a mission to Mars. Fifty men
and fifty women are all hoping
to become the first human beings
to walk on the red planet. They
now face a series of tests to
see how well they work under
pressure, with part of the
training to take place within a
simulated Martian environment.
The Mars One Project plans to
set up a perman

Moscow, Russia (Sputnik) Feb
20, 2015
The Earth's most powerful
particle accelerator is
returning to action next month
after a two-year break.
Scientists working with the
Large Hadron Collider [LHC] are
optimistic of a new breakthrough
in particle physics when the
accelerator comes back online in
March, after an upgrade of its
equipment which will allow the
instrument to fire particles at
almost twice the previous
energy. On 1

Paris (ESA) Feb 20, 2015
Slovakia becomes the ninth
country to sign the European
Cooperating State Agreement with
ESA. This agreement strengthens
Slovakia's relations with ESA,
after the signature of the first
Cooperation Agreement in April
2010. ESA's Head of the Director
General's Cabinet, Mr Karlheinz
Kreuzberg, and the Slovak
Minister of Education, Science,
Research and Sport, Mr Juraj
Draxler, signed the agre

Laurel MD (SPX) Feb 19, 2015
Exactly 85 years after Clyde
Tombaugh's historic discovery of
Pluto, the NASA spacecraft set
to encounter the icy planet this
summer is providing its first
views of the small moons
orbiting Pluto. The moons Nix
and Hydra are visible in a a
href="http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20150218">series
of images /a> taken by the New
Horizons spacecraft from Jan.
27-Feb. 8

Orlando FL (SPX) Feb 19, 2015
Several small-scale experiments
aboard NASA's vomit comet have
led to a NASA grant to study
early planet formation aboard a
satellite in low-Earth orbit for
a year or more. University of
Central Florida physics
professor Joshua Colwell this
month landed a grant to place a
thermos-sized experiment aboard
a satellite as part of NASA's
CubeSat Launch Initiative . UCF
landed two of the 14 gran

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 19,
2015
Newly 3-D printed wrenches, data
to improve cooling systems,
protein crystals and seedling
samples returned Feb. 10 aboard
SpaceX's fifth contracted
resupply mission to the
International Space Station.
Researchers will use samples and
data returned to improve
scientific studies on Earth and
build on research that will
enable space exploration.
Printed parts and hardware
returned from the f

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 19,
2015
Turning a rocket booster case
into spaghetti sounds more like
magic than engineering, but a
test that did just that could be
an important step in the future
of human space exploration. As
NASA prepares to test the
massive solid rocket booster for
the agency's Space Launch System
(SLS) rocket in March, a team of
engineers is looking even
farther into the future by
exploring an advanced comp

Paris (ESA) Feb 19, 2015
Thanks to space, some Parisian
Metro riders now enjoy a very
high-tech commute. A satellite
spin-off is paving the way for
more comfortable journeys.
Tourists and locals alike are
familiar with Metro Line One:
traversing the length of the
French capital, this underground
line is the city's busiest. More
than 213 million journeys are
made yearly on its 16.6 km
track, which serves 25 stations.

Houston TX (SPX) Feb 19, 2015
Growing bone on demand sounds
like a space-age concept-a
potentially life changing one.
Such a capability could benefit
those needing bone for
reconstructive surgery due to
trauma like combat injuries or
those waging a battle with
osteoporosis. Related research
is hardly science fiction, as a
study into a key bone-growing
protein was recently funded to
take place in orbit aboard the
Internationa

Tucson AZ (SPX) Feb 19, 2015
Two years after a 20-meter rock
slammed into the Earth after a
meteoroid dramatically
fragmented in the atmosphere
over the Chelyabinsk region in
Russia and injured hundreds of
people, its parent asteroid
remains elusive, a new paper
published in the journal Icarus
shows. Astronomers had
originally predicted that a 2-km
near-Earth asteroid (NEA)
designated (86039) 1999 NC43
could be the so

Dublin, Ireland (SPX) Feb 19,
2015
Moog's Dublin facility has
announced the commencement of a
European Space Agency (ESA)
technology transfer program to
protect spacecraft by reducing
harsh vibration experienced
during launches. The program
will make Moog Dublin the
European supplier of Moog's
patented SoftRide, a vibration
control technology that has
already provided launch load
alleviation for 34 satellites.
Moog Dublin w

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 19,
2015
Have your pencils and notebooks
handy because school is in
session. Welcome to Boosters
101. No, this lesson is not
about a child seat or an
amusement park ride if you
looked up boosters in the
encyclopedia. This is about
rocket boosters - and not only
that, but the largest, most
powerful ones ever built that
will give the "lift" necessary
to send astronauts to an
asteroid and to Mars on

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 19,
2015
Boeing has announced the
creation of BDS Development, an
organization within its Defense,
Space and Security (BDS) unit,
which will centralize its
defense and space efforts. The
company stated that this move
will enhance its performance on
the pre-production development
activities that significantly
influence its ability to provide
customers with the right
capabilities at the right time
an

San Jose, United States (AFP)
Feb 16, 2015
Satellites can help scientists
follow parasites and viruses,
and in some cases predict months
ahead of time an outbreak of
dengue fever or malaria,
researchers said Sunday. "Some
diseases are highly sensitive to
their environment, especially
parasitic diseases," said Archie
Clements, director of the school
of population health at the
Australian National University
in Canberra. "With remo

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 19,
2015
The hunt for Earth-like planets
around distant stars could soon
become a lot easier thanks to a
technique developed by
researchers in Germany. In a
paper published 18 February in
the Institute of Physics and
German Physical Society's New
Journal of Physics, the team of
researchers have successfully
demonstrated how a solar
telescope can be combined with a
piece of technology that has
alrea

Alexandria, Va. (UPI) Feb 16,
2015
The U.S. Navy has tapped SBG
Technology Solutions for support
of on-orbit communications
capabilities for open-ocean,
littoral, and naval land
operations. The contract, a
multi-year vehicle, was issued
by the Navy Program Executive
Office Space Systems, or PEO SS,
under its PMW 146 program for
communications satellites. The
monetary value of the award was
not disclosed. Un

Rochester NY (SPX) Feb 17,
2015
Although most materials slightly
expand when heated, there is a
new class of rubber-like
material that not only
self-stretches upon cooling; it
reverts back to its original
shape when heated, all without
physical manipulation. The
findings were recently published
in the journal ACS Macro
Letters. The material is like a
shape-memory polymer because it
can be switched between two
diffe

Edinburgh, UK (Sputnik) Feb
18, 2015
Using powerful radio telescopes
to broadcast "greetings
messages" into space will not
result in an alien invasion, a
chief scientist at the Search
for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence (SETI) Institute in
California told Sputnik Friday.
Astronomers have been listening
for messages from possible alien
civilizations since 1960,
without any tangible success.
But under a proposal, known as
"Active

Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 18,
2015
Craters and mysterious bright
spots are beginning to pop out
in the latest images of Ceres
from NASA's Dawn spacecraft.
These images, taken Feb. 12 at a
distance of 52,000 miles (83,000
kilometers) from the dwarf
planet, pose intriguing
questions for the science team
to explore as the spacecraft
nears its destination. "As we
slowly approach the stage, our
eyes transfixed on Ceres and her
p

Long Beach CA (SPX) Feb 18,
2015
Virgin Galactic and Abu Dhabi's
Aabar Investments PJS, is
pleased to announce it has
leased a new 150,000 square foot
facility that will house design
and manufacturing of the
company's small satellite launch
vehicle, LauncherOne.
LauncherOne is a new two-stage
orbital launch vehicle being
designed by Virgin Galactic
specifically to launch
commercial or governmental
satellites that weigh 50

Moscow, Russia (Sputnik) Feb
18, 2015
The popular myth about Russian
spacemen traveling to space
geared with weapons is actually
true and the question why they
did that is finally revealed.
Russian cosmonauts carried a
convertible shotgun which
doubled as an axe and machete
into space. The 'myth' about
Soviet spacemen being armed with
shotguns was a topic of great
interest on Russian forums for
the past few years. Recently it

Paris (SPX) Feb 18, 2015
Airbus Defence and Space has
been awarded a contract by SES
to design and develop SES-14, a
highly innovative
telecommunications satellite.
SES-14 is the first high-power
satellite in the 4-tonne class.
It will be based on Airbus
Defence and Space's
ultra-reliable Eurostar platform
in its E3000e variant, which
exclusively uses electric
propulsion for orbit raising
(EOR), taking advantage o

Moscow, Russia (Sputnik) Feb
18, 2015
The joint Russian-Ukrainian
company Kosmotras will go ahead
with the launches of commercial
and scientific satellites and
spacecraft it had planned for
2015 using the Dnepr-1 rocket,
including a South Korean Kompsat
remote sensing satellite in
mid-March. The March 12 launch
of the Dnepr-1 carrying a South
Korean satellite will go ahead
as planned, a source close to
the space industry told

Moscow, Russia (Sputnik) Feb
18, 2015
The probe passed mere 6
kilometers (3.7 miles) from the
surface of the ice ball in a
unique display of affection on
the Valentine's Day. The Rosetta
spacecraft has just scored
another historic first by making
the closest flyby of the comet
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko it has
been following and studying
since last August. 12:41 UT: At
closest approach to #67P! - ESA
Rosetta Mission (@ESA_Ros

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 18,
2015
The team responsible for the
Oscar-nominated visual effects
at the centre of Christopher
Nolan's epic, Interstellar, have
turned science fiction into
science fact by providing new
insights into the powerful
effects of black holes. In a
paper published 13 February, in
IOP Publishing's journal
Classical and Quantum Gravity,
the team describe the innovative
computer code that was used to
gene

Greenebelt MD (SPX) Feb 18,
2015
The radio frequency band that
many NASA missions use to
communicate with spacecraft -
S-band - is getting a bit
crowded and noisy, and likely to
get more jammed as science
missions demand higher and
higher data rates. A team of
NASA technologists at NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Maryland, just may
have a solution, particularly
for potential missions that plan
to operate

Tucson AZ (Sputnik) Feb 18,
2015
Arizona State University
researchers studied the timeline
of meteorite impacts on the moon
through a ground-breaking
application of laser microprobe
technology. A team led by
Arizona State University
researchers studied the timeline
of meteorite impacts on the moon
through a ground-breaking
application of laser microprobe
technology to Apollo 17 samples.
Developing an absolute chrono

Palo Alto CA (SPX) Feb 18,
2015
Space Systems/Loral (SSL) has
announced that the THOR 7
satellite, designed and built
for Telenor Satellite
Broadcasting (TSBc), is ready
for launch and will ship to the
European Spaceport in Kourou,
French Guiana later next week,
for launch aboard an Ariane 5
launch vehicle by Arianespace.
THOR 7 is a multi-mission
satellite equipped with
Telenor's first high performance
Ka-band payload,

Moscow, Russia (Sputnik) Feb
18, 2015
It gets lonely in space if
you're a foodie. However, some
cosmonauts and astronauts found
ways to deal with the problem by
bringing their own, or turning
to Earth for help. On Monday,
Russian cosmonauts surprised
their mission control when they
requested 15 packages of
mayonnaise to be sent in the
upcoming shipment of food to the
International Space Station
(ISS) instead of lemons and
tomatoes.

Atlanta GA (SPX) Feb 18, 2015
Ideas about directing evolution
of life forms on Earth and
finding life on other planets
are rapidly morphing from
science-fiction fantasy into
mainstream science, says David
Lynn, a chemist at Emory
University. "These areas of
science are rapidly coming of
age because of our increasing
knowledge and advancing
technology. It's an exciting
time. We're on the threshold of
answering fundament

Moscow, Russia (Sputnik) Feb
18, 2015
Data leakage from the servers
and computers of the Russian
Federal Space Agency Roscosmos
is not possible, a source in
Roscosmos told RIA Novosti
Tuesday. On Monday, the
Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab
security experts said they
discovered malware placed on
high-value computer hard drives
in over 30 countries. "The
information security system in
the rocket-space industry is
formed in a wa

Rochester NY (SPX) Feb 17,
2015
group of astronomers from the
US, Europe, Chile and South
Africa have determined that
70,000 years ago a recently
discovered dim star is likely to
have passed through the solar
system's distant cloud of
comets, the Oort Cloud. No other
star is known to have ever
approached our solar system this
close - five times closer than
the current closest star,
Proxima Centauri. In a paper
published

Washington (UPI) Feb 16, 2015
In 2012, dozens of amateur
astronomers spotted large plumes
of dust rising off the surface
of Mars. More than two years
later, scientists still don't
have a suitable explanation for
the phenomenon. In a new study,
published this week in the
journal Nature, scientists
recount the strange occurrence
and survey the various attempts
to illuminate the plumes'
origins or cause. The phe

Washington (UPI) Feb 16, 2015
The seas of Titan, Saturn's
largest moon, are no place for
astronauts. The frigid bodies of
liquified natural gas are a
study in inhabitability. But
scientists suggest its possible
some strange forms of life exist
under the of icy surface of
Kraken Mare, Titan's largest
sea. To learn more about this
unique world - and to probe
Titan's liquid environs for
signs of life - engineers at N

Montreal (AFP) Feb 12, 2015
A winter of strange weather and
turbulent transatlantic flights
has scientists asking: Has a
predicted climate imbalance of
the jet stream begun? The Arctic
is warming faster than other
parts of the world, and
scientists believe that is
having a dramatic impact on the
jet stream, which may be
responsible for the unusual
weather and stronger upper
atmospheric winds of late. On
January 8,

Ithaca NY (SPX) Feb 13, 2015
Circling hundreds of miles above
Earth, weather satellites are
working round-the-clock to
provide rainfall data that are
key to a complex system of
global flood prediction. A new
Cornell University study warns
that the existing system of
space-based rainfall observation
satellites requires a serious
overhaul. Particularly in many
developing countries,
satellite-based flood prediction
has w

Linkoping, Sweden (UPI) Feb
16, 2015
Saab's U.S. subsidiary has been
contracted to provide components
and sub-systems of the U.S.
Marine Corps AN/TPS-80
Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar
system. The award was issued by
Northrop Grumman and carries a
value of $32 million. Northrop
Grumman is the prime contractor
for the G/ATOR program. Its
contract to Saab Defense and
Security USA is for the first
four low-rate initial

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 12,
2015
Scientists are using biology to
improve the properties of
lithium ion batteries.
Researchers at the University of
Maryland, Baltimore County
(UMBC) have isolated a peptide,
a type of biological molecule,
which binds strongly to lithium
manganese nickel oxide (LMNO), a
material that can be used to
make the cathode in high
performance batteries. The
peptide can latch onto nanosized
particles

Chicago IL (SPX) Feb 13, 2015
Scientists discovered in 1937
that liquid helium-4, when
chilled to extremely low
temperatures, became a
superfluid that could leak
through glass, overflow its
containers, or eternally gush
like a fountain. Future Nobel
laureate Lev Landau came along
in 1941, predicting that
superfluid helium-4 should
contain an exotic, particle-like
excitation called a roton. But
scientists, including Lan

Peterson AFB CO (SPX) Feb 15,
2015
Air Force Space Command is
making new waves in improvements
and creativity with their
cost-saving "Out of the Box
Innovation" program. The purpose
of the program is to collect
strategically forward-thinking
ideas that support critical
enabling actions to allow
operators and acquirers to do
their jobs more efficiently,
gather the appropriate subject
matter experts to analyze the
viability o

Moscow, Russia (Sputnik) Feb
13, 2015
Russia's Strategic Missile
Forces have begun wide-range
exercises in 12 regions in the
country, the Russian Defense
Ministry said Thursday.
"Russia's SMF with more than 30
missile battalions in 12 regions
in Russia (from the Tver to the
Irkustsk regions) are taking
part in drills. There are both
mobile and stationary SMF groups
participating," the ministry
said in a statement. The wa

Livermore CA (SPX) Feb 13,
2015
Sandia National Laboratories
researchers are the first to
directly measure
hydroperoxyalkyl radicals - a
class of reactive molecules
denoted as "QOOH" - that are key
in the chain of reactions that
controls the early stages of
combustion. This breakthrough
has generated data on QOOH
reaction rates and outcomes that
will improve the fidelity of
models used by engine
manufacturers to create clean

Paris (AFP) Feb 15, 2015
The European Space Agency (ESA)
on Sunday said it had destroyed
its last supply ship to the
International Space Station,
bringing a seven-year venture to
a successful close. The last of
five robot delivery vessels that
ESA pledged for the US-led ISS
project, the Georges Lemaitre,
burned up in a suicide plunge
into Earth's atmosphere, the
agency said. At the control
centre in Toulouse, th

San Jose, United States (AFP)
Feb 15, 2015
US scientists and legal experts
are calling for a strong,
international authority to
regulate any man-made
interventions meant to combat
global warming, amid fears that
the technology could be harmful
to the environment. The field
known as geoengineering is not
currently regulated by any
institution or treaty, Edward
Parson, professor of
environmental law at the
University of California, Los

Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 09,
2015
NASA is part of CalWater 2015, a
massive research effort to study
atmospheric rivers this month.
Atmospheric rivers are flows of
tropical moisture across the
Pacific Ocean to the West Coast,
where the moisture falls as rain
or snow. One type of atmospheric
river is called the Pineapple
Express because it originates
near Hawaii. Storms driven by
atmospheric rivers produce about
40 percent o

Paris (SPX) Feb 15, 2015
The highly anticipated update of
the analysis of data from the
European Space Agency's Planck
satellite starts with a first
paper published in Astronomy and
Astrophysics, which already
holds in store a few major
surprises. The first article in
fact "rejuvenates" the stars of
our universe. Thanks to new maps
of cosmic background radiation
(in particular, those containing
"polarization aniso

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 15,
2015
This time-lapse "movie" of Pluto
and its largest moon, Charon,
was recently shot at
record-setting distances with
the Long-Range Reconnaissance
Imager (LORRI) on NASA's New
Horizons spacecraft. The movie
was made over about a week, from
Jan. 25-31, 2015. It was taken
as part of the mission's second
optical navigation ("OpNav")
campaign to better refine the
locations of Pluto and Charon in

Orlando, Fla. (UPI) Feb 12,
2015
Air Force brass came out in
force at the annual Air Warfare
Symposium and Technology
Exhibition to promote the
necessity of new big-ticket
programs for the 2016 budget
cycle. Leading the morning was
discussion of the Long-Range
Strike Bomber, described as the
"foundation" of how airmen will
innovate in the future, even in
peacetime employment. To answer
the question "why do we ne

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 15,
2015
Because the debris fields of
exploded stars, known as
supernova remnants, are very
hot, energetic, and glow
brightly in X-ray light, NASA's
Chandra X-ray Observatory has
proven to be a valuable tool in
studying them. The supernova
remnant called G299.2-2.9 (or
G299 for short) is located
within our Milky Way galaxy, but
Chandra's new image of it is
reminiscent of a beautiful
flower here on Earth.

Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 13,
2015
During 10 years of discovery,
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has
pulled back the smoggy veil that
obscures the surface of Titan,
Saturn's largest moon. Cassini's
radar instrument has mapped
almost half of the giant moon's
surface; revealed vast,
desert-like expanses of sand
dunes; and plumbed the depths of
expansive hydrocarbon seas. What
could make that scientific
bounty even more amazing? Well,
wha

Boston MA (SPX) Feb 15, 2015
The majority of stars in our
galaxy come in pairs. In
particular, the most massive
stars usually have a companion.
These fraternal twins tend to be
somewhat equal partners when it
comes to mass - but not always.
In a quest to find mismatched
star pairs known as extreme
mass-ratio binaries, astronomers
have discovered a new class of
binary stars. One star is fully
formed while the other is still

Tempe AZ (SPX) Feb 15, 2015
It's been more than 40 years
since astronauts returned the
last Apollo samples from the
moon, and since then those
samples have undergone some of
the most extensive and
comprehensive analysis of any
geological collection. A team
led by ASU researchers has now
refined the timeline of
meteorite impacts on the moon
through a pioneering application
of laser microprobe technology
to Apollo 17 samples

Luxembourg (SPX) Feb 15, 2015
SES has announced that its Astra
Connect for Communities solution
will be used in a UK
Government-funded Market Test
Pilot (MTP) project. These Pilot
projects aim to assess which
technologies and commercial
models are best suited to
deliver superfast broadband to
the final five percent of
households in the UK that
currently do not have access to
high-speed internet. SES is
working with Sat

Hamburg, Germany (SPX) Feb
11, 2015
For the first time, a
German-American research team
has determined the
three-dimensional shape of
free-flying silver nanoparticles,
using DESY's X-ray laser FLASH.
The tiny particles, hundreds of
times smaller than the width of
a human hair, were found to
exhibit an unexpected variety of
shapes, as the physicists from
the Technical University (TU)
Berlin, the University of
Rostock, the SLA

Orlando, Fla. (UPI) Feb 13,
2015
Representatives from some the
nation's largest defense firms
agreed a culture of risk
aversion at the Pentagon is
costing the American taxpayer
more than "fast failure."
Speaking on the topic of
innovation in the 21st century
at the Air Warfare Symposium and
Technology Exposition,
representatives from Lockheed
Martin, Northrop Grumman,
Boeing, Raytheon, Aurora Flight
Sciences and Pratt

Strasbourg, France (SPX) Feb
12, 2015
Light and matter can be so
strongly linked that their
characteristics become
indistinguishable. These
light-matter couplings are
referred to as polaritons. Their
energy oscillates continuously
between both systems, giving
rise to attractive new physical
phenomena. Now, scientists in
France have explained why such
polaritons can remain for an
unusual long time at the lowest
energy levels, i

Bratislava, Slovakia (SPX)
Feb 11, 2015
One of the ways of improving
electrons manipulation is though
better control over one of their
inner characteristics, called
spin. This approach is the
object of an entire field of
study, known as spintronics.
Now, Richard Pincak from the
Slovak Academy of Sciences and
colleagues have just uncovered
new possibilities for
manipulating the electrons on
the tips of graphitic nanocones.
Indeed

Paris (AFP) Feb 14, 2015
Europe's last supply vessel to
the International Space Station
undocked on Saturday at the end
of a six-month mission, the
European Space Agency (ESA)
said. The automated spaceship,
the Georges Lemaitre, separated
from the ISS ahead of an
operation on Sunday to burn it
up in Earth's atmosphere, ESA
said. It is the last of five
so-called Automated Transfer
Vehicles (ATV) that ESA has cont

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 11,
2015
Electronic devices have shrunk
rapidly in the past decades, but
most remain as stiff as the same
sort of devices were in the
1950s - a drawback if you want
to wrap your phone around your
wrist when you go for a jog or
fold your computer to fit in a
pocket. Researchers from South
Korea have taken a new step
toward more bendable devices by
manufacturing a thin film that
keeps its useful ele

Kourou, French Guiana (ESA)
Feb 11, 2015
An experimental vehicle to
develop an autonomous European
reentry capability for future
reusable space transportation
has completed its mission. ESA's
Intermediate eXperimental
Vehicle flew a flawless reentry
and splashed down in the Pacific
Ocean just west of the Galapagos
islands. The IXV spaceplane
lifted off at 13:40 GMT (14:40
CET, 10:40 local time) on 11
February from Europe's Spacep

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 18, 2015 - The team
responsible for the Oscar-nominated visual effects
at the centre of Christopher Nolan's epic,
Interstellar, have turned science fiction into
science fact by providing new insights into the
powerful effects of black holes.

In a paper published 13 February, in IOP
Publishing's journal Classical and Quantum Gravity,
the team describe the innovative computer code that
was used to generate the movie's iconic images of
the wormhole, black hole and various celestial
objects, and explain how the code has led them to
new science discoveries.

Using their code, the Interstellar team,
comprising London-based visual effects company
Double Negative and Caltech theoretical physicist
Kip Thorne, found that when a camera is close up to
a rapidly spinning black hole, peculiar surfaces in
space, known as caustics, create more than a dozen
images of individual stars and of the thin, bright
plane of the galaxy in which the black hole lives.
They found that the images are concentrated along
one edge of the black hole's shadow.

These multiple images are caused by the black
hole dragging space into a whirling motion and
stretching the caustics around itself many times. It
is the first time that the effects of caustics have
been computed for a camera near a black hole, and
the resulting images give some idea of what a person
would see if they were orbiting around a hole.

The discoveries were made possible by the
team's computer code, which, as the paper describes,
mapped the paths of millions of lights beams and
their evolving cross-sections as they passed through
the black hole's warped spacetime. The computer code
was used to create images of the movie's wormhole
and the black hole, Gargantua, and its glowing
accretion disk, with unparalleled smoothness and
clarity.

It showed portions of the accretion disk
swinging up over the top and down under Gargantua's
shadow, and also in front of the shadow's equator,
producing an image of a split shadow that has become
iconic for the movie.

This weird distortion of the glowing disk was
caused by gravitational lensing--a process by which
light beams from different parts of the disk, or
from distant stars, are bent and distorted by the
black hole, before they arrive at the movie's
simulated camera.

This lensing happens because the black hole
creates an extremely strong gravitational field,
literally bending the fabric of spacetime around
itself, like a bowling ball lying on a stretched out
bed sheet.

Early in their work on the movie, with the
black hole encircled within a rich field of distant
stars and nebulae instead of an accretion disk, the
team found that the standard approach of using just
one light ray for one pixel in a computer code--in
this instance, for an IMAX picture, a total of 23
million pixels--resulted in flickering as the stars
and nebulae moved across the screen.

Co-author of the study and chief scientist at
Double Negative, Oliver James, said: "To get rid of
the flickering and produce realistically smooth
pictures for the movie, we changed our code in a
manner that has never been done before. Instead of
tracing the paths of individual light rays using
Einstein's equations--one per pixel--we traced the
distorted paths and shapes of light beams."

Co-author of the study Kip Thorne said: "This
new approach to making images will be of great value
to astrophysicists like me. We, too, need smooth
images."

Oliver James continued: "Once our code, called
DNGR for Double Negative Gravitational Renderer, was
mature and creating the images you see in the movie
Interstellar, we realised we had a tool that could
easily be adapted for scientific research."

In their paper, the team report how they used
DNGR to carry out a number of research simulations
exploring the influence of caustics--peculiar,
creased surfaces in space--on the images of distant
star fields as seen by a camera near a fast spinning
black hole.

"A light beam emitted from any point on a
caustic surface gets focussed by the black hole into
a bright cusp of light at a given point," James
continued. "All of the caustics, except one, wrap
around the sky many times when the camera is close
to the black hole. This sky-wrapping is caused by
the black hole's spin, dragging space into a
whirling motion around itself like the air in a
whirling tornado, and stretching the caustics around
the black hole many times."

As each caustic passes by a star, it either
creates two new images of the star as seen by the
camera, or annihilates two old images of the star.
As the camera orbits around the black hole, film
clips from the DNGR simulations showed that the
caustics were constantly creating and annihilating a
huge number of stellar images.

The team identified as many as 13 simultaneous
images of the same star, and as many as 13 images of
the thin, bright plane of the galaxy in which the
black hole lives.

These multiple images were only seen when the
black hole was spinning rapidly and only near the
side of the black hole where the hole's whirling
space was moving toward the camera, which they
deduced was because the space whirl was 'flinging'
the images outward from the hole's shadow edge.

On the shadow's opposite side, where space is
whirling away from the camera, the team deduced that
there were also multiple images of each star, but
that the whirl of space compressed them inward, so
close to the black hole's shadow that they could not
be seen in the simulations.

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 18, 2015 - A team of
researchers from the University of Michigan and
Western Michigan University is exploring new
materials that could yield higher computational
speeds and lower power consumption, even in harsh
environments.

Most modern electronic circuitry relies on
controlling electronic charge within a circuit, but
this control can easily be disrupted in the presence
of radiation, interrupting information processing.
Electronics that use spin-based logic, or
spintronics, may offer an alternative that is robust
even in radiation-filled environments.

Making a radiation-resistant spintronic device
requires a material relevant for spintronic
applications that can maintain its spin-dependence
after it has been irradiated. In a paper published
in the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP
Publishing, the Michigan research team presents
their results using bulk Si-doped n-GaAs exposed to
proton radiation.

How Does Spintronics Work?
Modern electronic devices use charges to transmit
and store information, primarily based upon how many
electrons are in one place or another. When a lot of
them are at a given terminal, you can call that
'on.'

If you have very few of them at the same
terminal, you can call that 'off,' just like a light
switch. This allows for binary logic depending on
whether the terminal is 'on' or 'off.' Spintronics,
at its simplest, uses the 'on/off' idea, but instead
of counting the electrons, their spin is measured.

"You can think of the spin of an electron as a
tiny bar magnet with an arrow painted on it. If the
arrow points up, we call that 'spin-up.' If it
points down, we call that 'spin-down.' By using
light, electric, or magnetic fields, we can
manipulate, and measure, the spin direction," said
researcher Brennan Pursley, who is the first author
of the new study.

While spintronics holds promise for faster and
more efficient computation, researchers also want to
know whether it would be useful in harsh
environments. Currently, radioactivity is a major
problem for electronic circuitry because it can
scramble information and in the long term degrade
electronic properties. For the short term effects,
spintronics should be superior: radioactivity can
change the quantity of charge in a circuit, but
should not affect spin-polarized carriers.

Studying spintronic materials required that
the research team combine two well established
fields: the study of spin dynamics and the study of
radiation damage. Both tool sets are quite robust
and have been around for decades but combining the
two required sifting through the wealth of radiation
damage research. "That was the most difficult
aspect," explains Pursley.

"It was an entirely new field for us with a
variety of established techniques and terminology to
learn. The key was to tackle it like any new
project: ask a lot of questions, find a few good
books or papers, and follow the citations."

Technically, what the Michigan team did was to
measure the spin properties of n-GaAs as a function
of radiation fluence using time-resolved Kerr
rotation and photoluminescence spectroscopy.

Results show that the spin lifetime and
g-factor of bulk n-GaAs is largely unaffected by
proton irradiation making it a candidate for further
study for radiation-resistant spintronic devices.
The team plans to study other spintronic materials
and prototype devices after irradiation since the
hybrid field of irradiated spintronics is wide open
with plenty of questions to tackle.

Long term, knowledge of radiation effects on
spintronic devices will aid in their engineering. A
practical implementation would be processing on a
communications satellite where without the
protection of Earth's atmosphere, electronics can be
damaged by harsh solar radiation.

The theoretically achievable computation
speeds and low power consumption could be combined
with compact designs and relatively light shielding.
This could make communications systems faster,
longer-lived and cheaper to implement.

St. Louis MO (SPX) Feb 18, 2015 - We're so used
murder mysteries that we don't even notice how
mystery authors play with time. Typically the murder
occurs well before the midpoint of the book, but
there is an information blackout at that point and
the reader learns what happened then only on the
last page.

If the last page were ripped out of the book,
physicist Kater Murch, PhD, said, would the reader
be better off guessing what happened by reading only
up to the fatal incident or by reading the entire
book?

The answer, so obvious in the case of the
murder mystery, is less so in world of quantum
mechanics, where indeterminacy is fundamental rather
than contrived for our reading pleasure.

Even if you know everything quantum mechanics
can tell you about a quantum particle, said Murch,
an assistant professor of physics in Arts and
Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, you
cannot predict with certainty the outcome of a
simple experiment to measure its state. All quantum
mechanics can offer are statistical probabilities
for the possible results.

The orthodox view is that this indeterminacy
is not a defect of the theory, but rather a fact of
nature. The particle's state is not merely unknown,
but truly undefined before it is measured. The act
of measurement itself forces the particle to
collapse to a definite state.

In the Feb. 13 issue of Physical Review
Letters, Kater Murch describes a way to narrow the
odds. By combining information about a quantum
system's evolution after a target time with
information about its evolution up to that time, his
lab was able to narrow the odds of correctly
guessing the state of the two-state system from
50-50 to 90-10.

It's as if what we did today, changed what we
did yesterday. And as this analogy suggests, the
experimental results have spooky implications for
time and causality--at least in microscopic world to
which quantum mechanics applies.

Measuring a phantom
Until recently physicists could explore the quantum
mechanical properties of single particles only
through thought experiments, because any attempt to
observe them directly caused them to shed their
mysterious quantum properties.

But in the 1980s and 1990s physicists invented
devices that allowed them to measure these fragile
quantum systems so gently that they don't
immediately collapse to a definite state.

The device Murch uses to explore quantum space
is a simple superconducting circuit that enters
quantum space when it is cooled to near absolute
zero. Murch's team uses the bottom two energy levels
of this qubit, the ground state and an excited
state, as their model quantum system. Between these
two states, there are an infinite number of quantum
states that are superpositions, or combinations, of
the ground and excited states.

The quantum state of the circuit is detected
by putting it inside a microwave box. A few
microwave photons are sent into the box, where their
quantum fields interact with the superconducting
circuit. So when the photons exit the box they bear
information about the quantum system.

Crucially, these "weak," off-resonance
measurements do not disturb the qubit, unlike
"strong" measurements with photons that are resonant
with the energy difference between the two states,
which knock the circuit into one or the other state.

A quantum guessing game
In Physical Review Letters, Murch describes a
quantum guessing game played with the qubit.

"We start each run by putting the qubit in a
superposition of the two states," he said. "Then we
do a strong measurement but hide the result,
continuing to follow the system with weak
measurements."

They then try to guess the hidden result,
which is their version of the missing page of the
murder mystery.

"Calculating forward, using the Born equation
that expresses the probability of finding the system
in a particular state, your odds of guessing right
are only 50-50," Murch said. "But you can also
calculate backward using something called an effect
matrix. Just take all the equations and flip them
around. They still work and you can just run the
trajectory backward.

"So there's a backward-going trajectory and a
forward-going trajectory and if we look at them both
together and weight the information in both equally,
we get something we call a hindsight prediction, or
"retrodiction."

The shattering thing about the retrodiction is
that it is 90 percent accurate. When the physicists
check it against the stored measurement of the
system's earlier state it is right nine times out of
10.

Down the rabbit hole
The quantum guessing game suggests ways to make both
quantum computing and the quantum control of open
systems, such as chemical reactions, more robust.
But it also has implications for much deeper
problems in physics.

For one thing, it suggests that in the quantum
world time runs both backward and forward whereas in
the classical world it only runs forward.

"I always thought the measurement would
resolve the time symmetry in quantum mechanics,"
Murch said. "If we measure a particle in a
superposition of states and it collapses into one of
two states, well, that sounds like a process that
goes forward in time."

But in the quantum guessing experiment, time
symmetry has returned. The improved odds imply the
measured quantum state somehow incorporates
information from the future as well as the past. And
that implies that time, notoriously an arrow in the
classical world, is a double-headed arrow in the
quantum world.

"It's not clear why in the real world, the
world made up of many particles, time only goes
forward and entropy always increases," Murch said.
"But many people are working on that problem and I
expect it will be solved in a few years," he said.

In a world where time is symmetric, however,
is there such a thing as cause and effect? To find
out, Murch proposes to run a qubit experiment that
would set up feedback loops (which are chains of
cause and effect) and try to run them both forward
and backward.

"It takes 20 or 30 minutes to run one of these
experiments," Murch said, "several weeks to process
it, and a year to scratch our heads to see if we're
crazy or not."

"At the end of the day," he said, "I take
solace in the fact that we have a real experiment
and real data that we plot on real curves."

Chicago IL (SPX) Feb 13, 2015 - Scientists
discovered in 1937 that liquid helium-4, when
chilled to extremely low temperatures, became a
superfluid that could leak through glass, overflow
its containers, or eternally gush like a fountain.

Future Nobel laureate Lev Landau came along in
1941, predicting that superfluid helium-4 should
contain an exotic, particle-like excitation called a
roton. But scientists, including Landau, Nobel
laureate Richard Feynman and Wolf Prize recipient
Philippe Nozieres have debated what structure the
roton would take ever since.

"Even nowadays, after seven decades, it
remains an issue of interest and controversy," said
Cheng Chin, professor in physics at the University
of Chicago. But in a new paper published Feb. 3,
2015, in Physical Review Letters, Chin and four
associates describe how they can create roton
structure in a new system: atomic superfluid of
cesium-133 in the laboratory.

Scientists who specialize in superfluids have
found it difficult to study rotons. Chin's team has
pioneered a system that will make it much easier to
reveal the long-cloaked mysteries of the roton.

The UChicago researchers generated artificial
rotons using what they call the shaken lattice
technique. With this technique, the physicists
created a superfluid in a one-foot cylindrical
chamber cooled to a temperature of approximately 15
nano-Kelvin, just a tiny fraction of a degree above
absolute zero (minus 459.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

During the experiment, 30,000 cesium atoms
became trapped in a crossing pattern of infrared
laser beams. This optical lattice holds the atoms
fast, like eggs in a crate, while gently shaking
them.

Superfluidity in 10 seconds
"We need about 10 seconds to reach that temperature
to prepare a superfluid as our first step," Chin
said. "It is a brand new idea that shaking the
optical lattice leads to the emergence of the
rotons."

The superfluid persists for several seconds,
during which time the physicists create the roton
structure and image it to see how the structure
influences the superfluid's properties.

Competing research teams at the University of
Science and Technology in Shanghai, China, and at
Washington State University also succeeded in
creating roton structure using a different technique
within few weeks after the Chicago group announced
the result last summer. Those teams used additional
laser beams to excite the atoms in the proper way.

"We approached the challenge to create rotons
based on a new technology that we recently
developed," said Li-Chung Ha, a graduate student in
physics at UChicago. The lead author of the Physical
Review Letters paper, Ha played a key role in
developing the shaken lattice and in-situ imaging
techniques used to collect the roton data.

Chin's research group developed the lattice
shaking technique over a period of years. In 2013,
Ha, Chin and UChicago postdoctoral scholar Colin V.
Parker published a paper in Nature Physics showing
that a variation of that technique could reveal
interesting magnetic features in ultracold atoms.
Later, they realized that they could use the same
technique to create roton structure.

Engineering roton excitation
"With this technique, we can engineer an excitation
spectrum of the atoms," Ha said. This feature, a
hallmark of superfluid helium, is one of three
pieces of evidence reported in the paper indicating
that Ha and his associates had successfully created
roton structure.

The other two lines of evidence include the
measurements of roton energy confirming that its
manifestation depends on the atomic interaction. The
UChicago team also observed how roton excitations
affect the superfluidity by dragging a laser speckle
pattern across the superfluid.

"Experimentally, we see that a superfluid will
become weaker in the presence of roton structure,"
Chin said. A superfluid can flow with no friction up
to a maximum speed, called "superfluid critical
velocity." Rotons suppress the critical velocity,
which is the opposite of the desired goal to improve
the robustness of superfluidity.

How robust can superfluidity be?
Researchers have proposed many ways to increase the
robustness of superconductors, and atomic
superfluids offer experimental means to test these
ideas, Chin said.

"Superconductors can transfer energy without
dissipation, that is, without energy loss, so a
robust superconducting material can find widespread
applications everywhere," he said. At the moment,
power companies still use copper wire for energy
transmission, which carries with it energy losses
ranging from 30 to 40 percent from power plant to
home or office.

Switching to superconductivity is currently
impractical because superconducting material is
expensive, and it works only at extremely low
temperatures. More importantly, Chin noted, "a
single superconducting wire can only carry a limited
amount of energy."

"Our experiments provide a new platform to
study excitations of a superfluid. They can help us
better identify the key issues that limit the
robustness of superconductivity," he said.

New Brunswick NJ (SPX) Feb 13, 2015 - A new
explanation for a type of order, or symmetry, in an
exotic material made with uranium may lead to
enhanced computer displays and data storage systems,
and more powerful superconducting magnets for
medical imaging and levitating high-speed trains,
according to a Rutgers-led team of research
physicists.

The team's findings are a major step toward
explaining a puzzle that physicists worldwide have
been struggling with for 30 years, when scientists
first noticed a change in the material's electrical
and magnetic properties but were unable to describe
it fully. This subtle change occurs when the
material is cooled to 17.5 degrees above absolute
zero or lower (a bone-chilling minus 428 degrees
Fahrenheit).

"This 'hidden order' has been the subject of
nearly a thousand scientific papers since it was
first reported in 1985 at Leiden University in the
Netherlands," said Girsh Blumberg, professor in the
Department of Physics and Astronomy in the School of
Arts and Sciences.

Collaborators from Rutgers University, the Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Leiden
University, published their findings this week in
the web-based journal Science Express, which
features selected research papers in advance of
their appearance in the journal Science. Blumberg
and two Rutgers colleagues, graduate student
Hsiang-Hsi Kung and professor Kristjan Haule, led
the collaboration.

Changes in order are what make liquid
crystals, magnetic materials and superconductors
work and perform useful functions. While the
Rutgers-led discovery won't transform high-tech
products overnight, this kind of knowledge is vital
to ongoing advances in electronic technology.

"The Los Alamos collaborators produced a
crystalline sample of the uranium, ruthenium and
silicon compound with unprecedented purity, a
breakthrough we needed to make progress in solving
the puzzle of hidden order," said Blumberg. Uranium
is commonly known as an element in nuclear reactor
fuel or weapons material, but in this case,
physicists value it as a heavy metal with electrons
that behave differently than those in common metals.

Under these cold conditions, the orbital
patterns made by electrons in uranium atoms from
adjacent crystal layers become mirror images of each
other. Above the hidden order temperature, these
electron orbitals are the same. The Rutgers
researchers discovered this so-called "broken mirror
symmetry" using instrumentation they developed -
based on a principle known as Raman scattering - to
distinguish the pattern of the mirror images in the
electron orbitals.

Blumberg also credits two theoretical physics
professors at Rutgers for predicting the phenomenon
that his team discovered.

"In this field, it's rare to have such
predictive power," he said, noting that Gabriel
Kotliar developed a computational technique that led
to the prediction of the hidden order symmetry.
Haule and Kotliar applied this technique to predict
the changes in electron orbitals that Kung and
Blumberg detected.

At still colder temperatures of 1.5 degrees
above absolute zero, the material becomes
superconducting - losing all resistance to the flow
of electricity. While not practical for today's
products and systems that rely on superconductivity,
the material provides new insights into ways that
materials can become superconducting.

The hidden order puzzle has also been a focus
of other Rutgers researchers. Two years ago,
professors Premala Chandra and Piers Coleman, along
with Rutgers alumna Rebecca Flint, published another
theoretical explanation of the phenomenon in the
journal Nature.

The Leiden University collaborator, John
Mydosh, is a member of the laboratory that
discovered hidden order in 1985.

"The work of Blumberg and his team is an
important and viable step towards the understanding
of hidden order," Mydosh said. "We are well on our
way after 30 years towards the final solution."

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Feb 13, 2015 - A research team
led by Prof. Hiroshi M. Yamamoto of the Institute
for Molecular Science, National Institutes of
Natural Sciences has developed a novel
superconducting transistor which can be switched
reversibly between ON and OFF by light-irradiation.
This achievement is a milestone for future
high-speed switching devices or highly-sensitive
optical sensors.

The field-effect transistor (FET) is a basic
switching element that controls electrical current
in electronic circuits. FETs are currently included
in a variety of electronic devices such as smart
phones and computers. In recent years, much effort
has been devoted to develop a superconducting FET as
a key technology for computations using quantum
states.

In 2013, the research team developed the
world's first organic superconducting FET based on
the organic superconductor:
?-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu[N(CN)2]Br (?-Br). Their previous
work has allowed the organic superconducting FET to
be recognized again as having inherent advantages
such as flexibility and designability.

In this research, the team fabricated a novel
photo-switchable transistor by replacing the gate
electrode in the conventional FET with a
'spiropyran'-thin-film. When Dr. Masayuki Suda, a
member of the research team, shone a pale UV light
on this novel FET, it showed a rapid decrease of
electrical resistance and turned into a
superconducting state after 180 seconds.

Spiropyran is a photo-active organic molecule
that shows intra-molecular electrical polarization
by UV light irradiation. In this system, carriers
for the superconductivity can be accumulated by UV
light-induced electrical polarization of the
spiropyran-film. Dr. Suda also found that the device
can be switched to the superconducting state both by
gate-voltage control and light-irradiation control.

Such a multi-mode operation obtained by
combining two kinds of functional molecules,
BEDT-TTF and spiropyran, indicates the high
designability of organic systems. The
superconductivity could also be removed by visible
light-induced depolarization of the film.

This research presents a novel concept in
which "superconductivity can be switched by optical
stimuli," and will drive innovation in the field of
future high-speed switching devices or
high-sensitivity optical sensors. "Now it takes 180
seconds to switch the FET, but it can be operated
much faster in principle," said Dr. Suda, "and it
will open a way to a new type of devices that can
satisfy glowing demand for a high-speed information
infrastructure."

Menlo Park CA (SPX) Feb 13, 2015 - Scientists have
used an X-ray laser at the Department of Energy's
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to get the
first glimpse of the transition state where two
atoms begin to form a weak bond on the way to
becoming a molecule.

This fundamental advance, reported in Science
Express and long thought impossible, will have a
profound impact on the understanding of how chemical
reactions take place and on efforts to design
reactions that generate energy, create new products
and fertilize crops more efficiently.

"This is the very core of all chemistry. It's
what we consider a Holy Grail, because it controls
chemical reactivity," said Anders Nilsson, a
professor at the SLAC/Stanford SUNCAT Center for
Interface Science and Catalysis and at Stockholm
University who led the research. "But because so few
molecules inhabit this transition state at any given
moment, no one thought we'd ever be able to see it."

Bright, Fast Laser Pulses Achieve the
Impossible
The experiments took place at SLAC's Linac Coherent
Light Source (LCLS), a DOE Office of Science User
Facility. Its brilliant, strobe-like X-ray laser
pulses are short enough to illuminate atoms and
molecules and fast enough to watch chemical
reactions unfold in a way never possible before.

Researchers used LCLS to study the same
reaction that neutralizes carbon monoxide (CO) from
car exhaust in a catalytic converter. The reaction
takes place on the surface of a catalyst, which
grabs CO and oxygen atoms and holds them next to
each other so they pair up more easily to form
carbon dioxide.

In the SLAC experiments, researchers attached
CO and oxygen atoms to the surface of a ruthenium
catalyst and got reactions going with a pulse from
an optical laser. The pulse heated the catalyst to
2,000 kelvins - more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit -
and set the attached chemicals vibrating, greatly
increasing the chance that they would knock into
each other and connect.

The team was able to observe this process with
X-ray laser pulses from LCLS, which detected changes
in the arrangement of the atoms' electrons - subtle
signs of bond formation - that occurred in mere
femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second.

"First the oxygen atoms get activated, and a
little later the carbon monoxide gets activated,"
Nilsson said. "They start to vibrate, move around a
little bit. Then, after about a trillionth of a
second, they start to collide and form these
transition states."

'Rolling Marbles Uphill'
The researchers were surprised to see so many of the
reactants enter the transition state - and equally
surprised to discover that only a small fraction of
them go on to form stable carbon dioxide. The rest
break apart again.

"It's as if you are rolling marbles up a hill,
and most of the marbles that make it to the top roll
back down again," Nilsson said. "What we are seeing
is that many attempts are made, but very few
reactions continue to the final product. We have a
lot to do to understand in detail what we have seen
here."

Theory played a key role in the experiments,
allowing the team to predict what would happen and
get a good idea of what to look for. "This is a
super-interesting avenue for theoretical chemists.
It's going to open up a completely new field," said
report co-author Frank Abild-Pedersen of SLAC and
SUNCAT.

A team led by Associate Professor Henrik
Ostrom at Stockholm University did initial studies
of how to trigger the reactions with the optical
laser. Theoretical spectra were computed under the
leadership of Stockholm Professor Lars G.M.
Pettersson, a longtime collaborator with Nilsson.

Preliminary experiments at SLAC's Stanford
Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), another
DOE Office of Science User Facility, also proved
crucial. Led by SSRL's Hirohito Ogasawara and
SUNCAT's Jerry LaRue, they measured the
characteristics of the chemical reactants with an
intense X-ray beam so researchers would be sure to
identify everything correctly at the LCLS, where
beam time is much more scarce. "Without SSRL this
would not have worked," Nilsson said.

The team is already starting to measure
transition states in other catalytic reactions that
generate chemicals important to industry.

"This is extremely important, as it provides
insight into the scientific basis for rules that
allow us to design new catalysts," said SUNCAT
Director and co-author Jens N&ostroke;rskov.

London UK (SPX) Feb 10, 2015 - New research from UCL
and the Universities of Gdansk, Singapore, and Delft
has uncovered additional second laws of
thermodynamics which complement the ordinary second
law of thermodynamics, one of the most fundamental
laws of nature. These new second laws are generally
not noticeable except on very small scales, at which
point, they become increasingly important.

The ordinary second law states that the
universe is in a growing state of disorder. It tells
us that a hot cup of tea in a cold room will cool
down rather than heat up; that even the most
efficient machines will lose some energy as heat;
and more prosaically, that a house will gradually
get messier over time rather than tidying itself.

The research, published in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
reveals that on very small scales there is actually
a whole family of 'second laws', which can lead to
unexpected and counterintuitive phenomena.

"The traditional second law of thermodynamics
is sometimes thought of as a statistical law that
only holds when there is a vast numbers of particles
that make up a system," said Professor Jonathan
Oppenheim (UCL Physics and Astronomy), one of the
authors of the study. "Even while individual parts
of a system may become more ordered, the overall
entropy of the total system (a measure of disorder)
increases."

In a sense, the traditional second law only
holds on average.

More recently, physicists have begun wondering
whether the second law holds not just on average,
for very large systems, but whether it holds for
small individual systems, such as those with only a
small number of particles. Surprisingly, the
researchers found that not only does the second law
hold at such small scales, but there are actually
many other second laws at work. In other words, just
like larger systems, small systems also tend to
become more disordered. But there are additional
second laws which constrain the way in which
disorder can increase.

"These additional second laws, can be thought
of as saying that there are many different kinds of
disorder at small scales, and they all tend to
increase as time goes on," said co-author Professor
Michal Horodecki (Gdansk).

The researchers found additional measures of
disorder, all different to the standard entropy,
which quantify different types of disorder. They
showed that not only does entropy increase, but
other types of disorder also have to increase.

"Statistical laws apply when we consider large
numbers. For example, imagine we toss a coin
thousands of times. In this case, we expect to see
roughly equal numbers of heads as tails. However,
this is not true when tossing the coin just a few
times. It's possible we will find all the coins
landing tails. Similar phenomena occur when
considering systems made out of very few particles,
instead of very many particles," said co-author
Professor Stephanie Wehner (Delft). "We can use
tools from quantum information theory to understand
the case when we don't have a large number of
particles."

Professor Oppenheim added: "While a quantum
house will get messier rather than tidier, like a
normal house, our research shows that the ways in
which it can get messier are constrained by a range
of extra laws.

"Stranger still, the way these second laws
interact with each other can even make it look like
the traditional second law has been violated. For
instance, a small system can spontaneously become
more ordered when it interacts with another system
which barely seems to change. That means some rooms
in the quantum house may spontaneously become much
tidier, while others only become messier but only
imperceptibly."

The results of the study give an improved
understanding of how heat and energy is transformed
on very small scales. This is expected to have wide
applications in the design of small systems,
including nanoscale devices, biological motors, and
quantum technologies such as quantum computers.

Saitama, Japan (SPX) Feb 10, 2015 - We all like to
know our watches keep the time well, but Hidetoshi
Katori, of RIKEN's Quantum Metrology Laboratory and
the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of
Engineering, is taking precision to an entirely new
dimension.

In work published in Nature Photonics,
Katori's group demonstrated two cryogenically cooled
optical lattice clocks that can be synchronized to a
tremendous one part in 2.0 x 10-18--meaning that
they would only go out of synch by a second in 16
billion years. This is nearly 1,000 times more
precise than the current international timekeeping
standard cesium atomic clock.

While nobody really needs a watch that
precise, the development of this clock could be
pivotal in opening the path to a long-held dream,
clock-based geodesy. Relativistic geodesy, as it is
also known, is a new way of making measurements of
the shape of the earth, taking advantage of the fact
that in accordance with Einstein's general principle
of relativity, clocks in a strong gravitational
field will tick more slowly than those in a lower
field.

As a result, a clock that is located slightly
further away from the center of the earth will run a
little faster than one closer to the center. The
difference is extremely slight, however, as a clock
set one kilometer above another will only run a few
seconds ahead of another in a million years.

However, optical lattice clocks are so
fantastically precise that they offer the prospect
of actually using the tiny difference to make
measurements of the strength of the gravitational
potential at different locations and different
times, creating a new role for clocks beyond their
traditional role as time-keepers.

This would make it possible to use clocks to
take measurements of how different parts of the
earth are moving, upward or downward, relative to
others, and thus could contribute to a better
understanding of geological processes such as those
that lead to earthquakes.

To perform the feat, the group developed two
optical lattice clocks, with atoms of strontium held
in a laser-generated optical lattice with a "magic"
wavelength, discovered by Katori, that allows
precise measurement.

At this wavelength, the laser-generated
optical lattice does not affect the atoms To
eliminate perturbations from blackbody
radiation--one of the principle sources of
disturbances for the experiments--the containers
were cooled to about -180 degrees Celsius using a
special refrigerator, and the insides were coated in
black to prevent reflections from even the small
amount of light seeping in through the two holes,
with diameters of just a millimeter and a half-millimeter,
that were opened to allow the atoms and the lasers
necessary to trap them in place in the set-up.

The strontium atoms were then inserted into
the optical lattice, and the electronic transition
frequency was compared between the two clocks for a
period of a month. The results confirmed that great
precision could be achieved with these clocks.

According to Katori, "It was a great feeling
to have shown this excellent agreement between the
clocks. If we can miniaturize this technology
further, it would have useful applications, since
tiny fluctuations in gravitational potential could
be used to detect underground resources, underground
spaces, and the movement of lava.

"We also hope that in the future, this will
accelerate the movement toward a new definition of
the international second, based on optical lattice
clocks, to an even more stringent standard than the
current definition of the second, which is based on
cesium oscillation."

Munich, Germany (SPX) Feb 09, 2015 - Viatcheslav
Mukhanov, cosmologist at
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich,
models the first instants after the creation of our
Universe. Data from the Planck telescope have now
confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt his theory of
the quantum origin of structure in the Universe.

What exactly happened after the Universe was
born? Why did stars, planets and huge galaxies form?
These are the questions that concern Viatcheslav
Mukhanov, and he tries to find the answers with the
help of mathematical physics.

Mukhanov, Professor of Physics at LMU, is an
acknowledged expert in the field of Theoretical
Cosmology - and he has used the notion of so-called
quantum fluctuations to construct a theory that
provides a precise picture of the crucial initial
phase of the evolution of our Universe: For without
the minimal variations in energy density that result
from the tiny but unavoidable quantum fluctuations,
one cannot account for the formation of stars,
planets and galaxies that characterize the Universe
we observe today.

The Planck Consortium has now published new
analyses of data returned by the eponymous space
telescope.

The telescope on board of the Planck satellite
has measured the distribution of the cosmic
microwave background radiation (CMB), which, in
essence, tells us what the Universe looked like
about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. These latest
findings are in complete agreement with the
predictions of Mukhanov's theory - for example, his
calculation of the value of the so-called spectral
index of the initial inhomogeneities.

As Jean-Loup Puget, Principal Investigator for
the HFI-instrument on the Planck satellite, stated:
"The Planck data confirm the basic predictions that
quantum fluctuations are at the origin of all
structures in the Universe." Mukhanov, who first
published his model in 1981 and joined the Physics
Faculty at LMU in 1997, says "I couldn't hope for a
better verification of my theory."

Messages from the remote past
For Mukhanov, the idea that quantum fluctuations
must have played a role in the very earliest phase
of the history of the Universe is implicit in
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Heisenberg
showed that there is a specific limit to the
precision with which the position and the momentum
of a particle can be determined at any given moment.
This in turn implies that the initial matter
distribution will inevitably exhibit minute
inhomogeneities in density.

Mukhanov's calculations first demonstrated
that such quantum fluctuations could give rise to
density differences in the early Universe, which in
turn could serve as seeds for the galaxies and their
clusters. Indeed, without quantum fluctuations,
whose nature and magnitude Mukhanov quantitatively
characterized, the observed distribution of matter
in the Universe would be inexplicable.

The latest study of the Planck datasets is
more detailed and more informative than the
preliminary analysis published about 2 years ago. It
reveals with unprecedented precision the patterns
imprinted by primordial fluctuations on the
distribution of radiation in the young Universe.

Thus, instruments such as the Planck telescope
can record these dispatches from an unimaginably
remote past encoded in the microwave radiation that
is still propagating through space - 13.8 billion
years later. And from this information the Planck
team can reconstruct a detailed picture of the
distribution of matter at the birth of our Universe.

No observational evidence for gravitational
waves
Furthermore, the Planck data show that a previously
reported signal purportedly confirming the existence
of so-called primordial gravitational waves can be
largely attributed to dust in our own galaxy. The
BICEP2 team is using a ground-based telescope in the
Antarctic to search the CMB for signs of gravity
waves produced immediately after the Big Bang. In
March 2014, the team reported the detection of the
long-sought pattern.

However, doubts soon emerged regarding this
interpretation. Now a joint analysis by the Planck
and BICEP2 teams has concluded that the data do not
actually provide observational evidence for
gravitational waves. In the spring of 2014
Viatcheslav Mukhanov had already asserted that, if
the theory is correct, then the BICEP2 and Planck
teams could not both be right. Thus this latest
Planck-BICEP2 analysis reassures us that the
theoretical framework is well-founded.

"Gravitational waves may well be there," he
said then, "but clearly our instruments are not yet
sensitive enough to pick them up." - Regardless of
whether or not the search for primordial
gravitational waves succeeds, he adds, no model that
tries to capture the immediate aftermath of the Big
Bang can now leave the quantum origin of the
Universe's structure out.

Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 09, 2015 - Hot gas, dust and
magnetic fields mingle in a colorful swirl in this
new map of our Milky Way galaxy. The image is part
of a new and improved data set from Planck, a
European Space Agency mission in which NASA played a
key role.

Planck spent more than four years observing
relic radiation left over from the birth of our
universe, called the cosmic microwave background.
The space telescope is helping scientists better
understand the history and fabric of our universe,
as well as our own Milky Way.

"Planck can see the old light from our
universe's birth, gas and dust in our own galaxy,
and pretty much everything in between, either
directly or by its effect on the old light," said
Charles Lawrence, the U.S. project scientist for the
mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, California.

The new data are available publicly Feb. 5,
and now include observations made during the entire
mission. The Planck team says these data are
refining what we know about our universe, making
more precise measurements of matter, including dark
matter, and how it is clumped together. Other key
properties of our universe are also measured with
greater precision, putting theories of the cosmos to
ever more stringent tests.

One cosmic property appears to have changed
with this new batch of data: the length of time in
which our universe remained in darkness during its
infant stages. A preliminary analysis of the Planck
data suggests that this epoch, a period known as the
Dark Ages that took place before the first stars and
other objects ignited, lasted more than 100 million
years or so longer than thought.

Specifically, the Dark Ages ended 550 million
years after the Big Bang that created our universe,
later than previous estimates by other telescopes of
300 to 400 million years. Research is ongoing to
confirm this finding.

The Planck data also support the idea that the
mysterious force known as dark energy is acting
against gravity to push our universe apart at
ever-increasing speeds. Some scientists have
proposed that dark energy doesn't exist. Instead,
they say that what we know about gravity, as
outlined by Albert Einstein's general theory of
relativity, needs refining. In those theories,
gravity becomes repulsive across great distances,
eliminating the need for dark energy.

"So far Einstein is looking pretty good," said
Martin White, a U.S. Planck team member from
University of California, Berkeley. "The dark energy
hypothesis is holding up very well, but this is not
the end of the story."

What's more, the new Planck catalog of images
now has more than 1,500 clusters of galaxies
observed throughout the universe, the largest
catalog of this type ever made. It is archived at
the European Space Agency and, in the U.S., at
NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at
the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
These galaxy clusters act as beacons at the
crossroads of huge filamentary structures in a
cosmic web. They help scientists trace our recent
cosmic evolution.

A new analysis by the Planck team of more than
400 of these galaxy clusters gives us a new look at
their masses, which range between 100 to 1,000 times
that of our Milky Way galaxy. In one of the
first-of-its-kind efforts, the Planck team obtained
the cluster masses by observing how the clusters
bend background microwave light. The results narrow
in on the overall mass of hundreds of clusters, a
huge step forward in better understanding dark
matter and dark energy.

How can so much information about our
universe, in both its past and current states, be
gleaned from the Planck data? Planck, like its
predecessor missions, captured ancient light that
has traveled billions of years to reach us. This
light, the cosmic microwave background, originated
370,000 years after the Big Bang, during a time when
the flame of our universe cooled enough that light
was no longer impeded by charged particles and could
travel freely.

Planck's splotchy maps of this light show
where matter had just begun to clump together into
the seeds of the galaxies we see around us today. By
analyzing the patterns of clumps, scientists can
learn how conditions even earlier in the universe,
just moments after its birth, set the clumping
process in motion. What's more, the scientists can
study how the ancient light has changed during its
long journey to reach us, learning about the entire
history of the cosmos.

"The cosmic microwave background light is a
traveler from far away and long ago," said Lawrence.
"When it arrives, it tells us about the whole
history of our universe."

A big challenge for Planck scientists is
sifting through all the long-wavelength light in our
universe to pick out the signature from just the
ancient cosmic microwave background. Much of our
galaxy gives off light of the same wavelength,
blocking our view of the relic radiation. But what
might be one scientist's trash is another's
treasure, as illustrated in the new map of the Milky
Way released last week.

Light generated from within our galaxy, the
same light subtracted from the ancient signal, comes
to life gloriously in the new image. Gas, dust and
magnetic field lines make up a frenzy of activity
that shapes how stars form.

More papers analyzing the data are expected to
come out next year.

James Bartlett, a U.S. Planck team member from
JPL, said, "The kind of questions we ask now we
never would have thought possible to even ask
decades ago, long before Planck."

Planck launched in 2009 and completed its
mission 4.5 years later in 2013. NASA's Planck
Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed
mission-enabling technology for both of Planck's
science instruments. European, Canadian and U.S.
Planck scientists work together to analyze the
Planck data.

Canberra, Australia (SPX) Feb 06, 2015 - Scientists
have settled a long running debate on one of the
fundamental time measures for galactic history - the
half-life of a radioactive isotope of iron.

The new, accurate figure for the iron-60
half-life will bring clarity to many details of how
the heavy elements were formed during the evolution
of the galaxy.

The team found that the half-life of iron-60
is 2.6 million years, resolving the large
discrepancy between two previous measurements that
found values of 1.5 million years and 2.62 million
years respectively.

"The iron-60 half-life is integral to theories
about supernovae and the early Solar System," said
Dr Anton Wallner, from The Australian National
University Research School of Physics and
Engineering.

"Because iron-60 is formed predominantly in
supernovae its presence on earth is thought to
indicate that there were nearby supernovae in the
last 10 million years. These may have had an effect
on earth's climate or even triggered the birth of
the solar system more than 4 billion years ago."

Most iron-60 is formed in massive stars, which
explode at the end of their lives in a supernova
event, spreading the radioactive element through
space.

Today iron-60 can be observed directly in our
Milky Way through characteristic radiation emitted
during its radioactive decay, indicating where
recent supernovae have created new elements.

The slow decay of iron-60 makes it difficult
to measure the decay time precisely. The team used a
unique mass spectrometer system at the Heavy Ion
Accelerator Facility at ANU, which is more sensitive
than previous experiments.

The team of scientists from Australia,
Switzerland and Austria used artificially produced
iron-60 extracted from nuclear waste.

Houston TX (SPX) Feb 05, 2015 - A new study by a
team of physicists at Rice University, Zhejiang
University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Florida
State University and the Max Planck Institute adds
to the growing body of evidence supporting a theory
that strange electronic behaviors -- including
high-temperature superconductivity and heavy fermion
physics -- arise from quantum fluctuations of
strongly correlated electrons.

The study, which appeared in Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, describes results
from a series of experiments on a layered composite
of cerium, rhodium and indium. The experiments
tested, for the first time, a prediction from a
theory about the origins of quantum criticality that
was published by Rice physicist Qimiao Si and
colleagues in 2001.

"Our theory was a surprise at the time because
it broke with the textbook framework and suggested
that a broad range of phenomena -- including
high-temperature superconductivity -- can only be
explained in terms of the collective behavior of
strongly correlated electrons rather than by the
more familiar theory based on essentially decoupled
electrons," said Si, a co-corresponding author on
the new study and Rice's Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess
Professor of Physics and Astronomy.

Experimental evidence in support of the theory
has mounted over the past decade, and the PNAS study
fills yet another gap. In the experiments,
researchers probed high-quality samples of a
heavy-fermion material known as CeRhIn5.

Heavy fermion materials like CeRhIn5 are
prototype systems for quantum criticality. In these
materials, electrons tend to act in unison, and even
one electron moving through the system causes
widespread effects. This "correlated electron"
behavior is very different from the electron
interactions in a common metal like copper, and
physicists have become increasingly convinced that
correlated electron behavior plays an important role
in phenomena like superconductivity and quantum
criticality.

Quantum critical points, near which these
strange correlated effects are particularly
pronounced, mark a smooth phase change, or
transition from one state of matter to another. Just
as the melting of ice involves a transition from a
solid to a liquid state, the electronic state of
quantum materials changes when the material is
cooled to a quantum critical point.

The critical temperature of a material can be
raised or lowered if the material is chemically
altered, placed under high pressure or put into a
strong magnet.

In the new experiments, which were carried out
using the high magnetic field facilities at Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and at
Florida State University, researchers observed a
magnetically induced quantum critical point at
ambient pressure and compared it to the previously
studied case of a pressure-induced quantum critical
point.

The nature of the quantum critical point was
probed by something called the "Fermi surface," a
sort of three-dimensional map that represents the
collective energy states of all electrons in the
material.

When physicists have previously attempted to
describe quantum phase transitions using traditional
theories, equations dictate that the Fermi surface
must change smoothly and gradually as the material
passes through the critical point. In that case,
most of the electrons on the Fermi surface are still
weakly coupled to each other.

In contrast, Si's theory predicts that the
Fermi surface undergoes a radical and instantaneous
shift at the critical point. The electrons on the
entire Fermi surface become strongly coupled,
thereby giving rise to the strange-metal properties
that allow unusual electronic states, including
superconductivity.

"We observed exactly the sort of a sharp Fermi
surface reconstruction predicted by theory of
unconventional quantum criticality," said study
co-author Frank Steglich, director of the Max Planck
Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden,
Germany, and also of the Center for Correlated
Matter at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.

Zhejiang physicist Huiqiu Yuan,
co-corresponding author on the study, said, "Our
experiments demonstrate that direct measurements of
a Fermi surface can distinguish theoretically
proposed models of quantum criticality and point to
a universal description of quantum phase
transitions."

Heavy-fermion metals and high-temperature
superconductors are examples of quantum matter, and
the new research is an example of the pathbreaking,
collaborative research that Rice hopes to foster
with the new Rice Center for Quantum Materials.

Si, who also directs the new center, said,
"Our study exemplifies the kind of progress in
quantum materials that can be made through
collaborations among theory, materials synthesis and
spectroscopic measurements. At the Rice Center for
Quantum Materials, we seek to foster this type of
synergy, both internally at Rice University and
through collaborations with our domestic and
international partner institutions."

Mainz, Germany (SPX) Feb 05, 2015 - Small magnetic
whirls may revolutionize future data storage and
information processing if they can be moved rapidly
and reliably in small structures. A team of
scientists of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
(JGU) and TU Berlin, together with colleagues from
the Netherlands and Switzerland, has now been able
to investigate the dynamics of these whirls
experimentally.

The skyrmions, as these tiny whirls are called
after the British nuclear physicist Tony Skyrme,
follow a complex trajectory and even continue to
move after the external excitation is switched off.

This effect will be especially important when
one wants to move a skyrmion to a selected position
as necessary in a future memory device. This
research was published in the journal Nature Physics
with a student of the Graduate School of Excellence
Materials Science in Mainz (MAINZ) as the first
author.

Skyrmions are small whirls in the
magnetization of magnetic materials. In the case of
the present work, the skyrmions have a diameter of
less than 100 nanometers. This corresponds roughly
to a thousandth of a hair width.

To prepare these skyrmions, scientists at
Mainz University prepared small magnetic discs.
"When we apply a specific external magnetic field,
the magnetization in these discs creates whirls,"
said Dr. Benjamin Kruger working in the group of
Professor Mathias Klaui at the Institute of Physics
at JGU. These skyrmions were then excited by a
magnetic field pulse to trace their motion.

The scientists were now able to experimentally
investigate the dynamics of these structures on
short time scales for the first time. For these
investigations, a holographic measurement setup
using short and highly energetic X-ray pulses was
used. This technique, which was developed at TU
Berlin, can take images with a temporal separation
of less than a nanosecond. The position of the whirl
can be determined from these images to be compared
with theoretical calculations.

"The measurements show that the skyrmions move
on a very complex trajectory, a so- called
hypo-cycloid," says Kruger. The fact that the
skyrmions move on such a curved trajectory means
that they must possess some inertia.

This is comparable to a car that continues to
move, even though the gas pedal is no longer
pressed. The inertia of the skyrmion stems from the
fact that the whirl can deform. In this way it is
able to store energy; after the excitation has
stopped, this energy leads to a continuation of the
motion.

"This effect has not been taken into account
up to now, but it is important for the development
of small magnetic memories," explained Professor
Mathias Klaui. "This effect has to be taken into
account to enable the distinct positioning of the
skyrmion in the memory."

Skyrmions may be important for the future of
magnetic data storage and information processing.
These whirls can be moved rapidly and reliably along
nanowires or other structures in future memories.
Such a memory would retain its information even when
the power is switched off. In addition, it would not
need to contain any moving parts, such as a read and
write head in a hard disk drive.

A comparison with computer simulations at
Mainz University showed that the type of motion
depends a little on the shape of the disk in which
the whirl is formed. In addition, there is only a
small dependence on defects in the material. There
is, however, a substantial dependence on the shape
of the whirl, its so-called topology. This implies
that the present findings can be extended to all
skyrmions with the same topology.

"I am happy about the good collaboration with
our colleagues and about the fact that the
experimental measurements, as well as the theory,
were done by members of the JGU Institute of Physics
and the MAINZ Graduate School of Excellence
together," Klaui added.

Funding of the Graduate School Materials
Science in Mainz was approved in the Excellence
Initiative of the German federal and state
governments in 2007 and was prolonged by an
additional five years in the second round of the
initiative in June 2012. MAINZ combines work groups
from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the
University of Kaiserslautern, and the Max Planck
Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz. One of its
research focuses is spintronics, a field in which
collaborations with international partners play an
important role.

Orsay, France (UPI) Jan 31, 2015 - Scientists have
countered a controversial 2014 study that claimed to
find evidence of the rapid expansion of the early
universe, upending what was considered the best
evidence of the Big Bang theory.

Scientists working with the European Space
Agency's Planck satellite, which observes the Cosmic
Microwave Background, said the apparent
gravitational waves that were thought to be caused
by cosmic inflation were instead space dust.

In March, researchers from the U.S.-led BICEP2
project at the South Pole said the gravitational
waves were evidence of the "first big tremors of the
Big Bang" about 13.8 billion years ago.

The BICEP2 team concluded the pattern they
observed in polarized light in a small patch of sky
originated in the primordial gravitational waves
that astronomers believe would be present if cosmic
inflation had occurred.

But in September Planck scientists revealed
new data that showed polarized dust emissions were
more widespread than previously thought.

Planck researchers teamed up with BICEP2
scientists and used the latest data from the Keck
Array, also in the South Pole, to conduct a joint
study, which found the same effect can be produced
by interstellar dust in the Milky Way, our own
galaxy.

"So, unfortunately, we have not been able to
confirm that the signal is an imprint of cosmic
inflation," Jean-Loup Puget, principal investigator
of the HFI instrument on Planck at the Institut
d'Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France, said.

Researchers note, however, that cosmic
inflation is still an open question.

"This [most recent] analysis shows that the
amount of gravitational waves can probably be no
more than about half the observed signal [from the
2014 study]", says Clem Pryke, a principal
investigator of BICEP2 at University of Minnesota.

"The gravitational wave signal could still be
there, and the search is definitely on."

Singapore (SPX) Jan 29, 2015 - What are the
high-energy processes in the Universe that occur in
the immediate vicinity of a black hole? To study a
question like this one cannot simply utilize a
high-resolution telescope. Even with the best
available telescopes, it is difficult or even
impossible to directly resolve the regions of
interest and the energies emitted from such objects
extend to much higher energies, e.g. X-rays.

The astrophysics research group at Washington
University in St.Louis built an instrument that is
capable to measure the polarization properties of
X-rays. This instrument, once flown in space, can be
used in a novel approach to study the most extreme
objects in the Universe, such as black holes and
neutron stars.

Only the most extreme objects in the universe
are capable of producing high-energy particles and
emit radiation with energy in the X-ray band and
above.

However, the regions of interest (black hole
vicinities, formation zones of relativistic plasma
jets, etc.) are too small to be spatially resolved
with purely imaging instruments. The solution is to
perform indirect measurements of those regions using
the polarization properties of the emitted radiation
- such as the orientation of the electric field
vector of the X-ray photons.

Such observations are regularly performed at
radio and optical wave bands, but sensitive
polarization techniques have not yet available for
observations at X-ray energies - needed to study the
most extreme objects in the Universe.

The astrophysics research group at Washington
University, led by Prof. Krawczynski and Prof.
Beilicke, designed, built, and tested an X-ray
polarimeter named X-Calibur. This instrument, once
flown in space or as a scientific balloon payload,
will be capable to study the energetic environments
very close to the black hole.

"Only five years ago, we came up with the
first design of the X-Ray polarimeter," Assistant
Professor Matthias Beilicke said, "two years later
we had a working prototype module and now the full
instrument is ready to fly on an astrophysics
mission."

"We are planning to have a scientific test
flight of the instrument as a balloon payload at an
altitude of >120,000 feet in the year 2016," Prof.
Krawczynski said.

Chicago IL (SPX) Jan 29, 2015 - How do you make an
optical fiber transmit light only one way?
Researchers from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign have experimentally demonstrated,
for the first time, the phenomenon of Brillouin
Scattering Induced Transparency (BSIT), which can be
used to slow down, speed up, and block light in an
optical waveguide.

The BSIT phenomenon permits light to travel in
the forward direction while light traveling in the
backward direction is strongly absorbed. This
non-reciprocal behavior is essential for building
isolators and circulators that are indispensible
tools in an optical designer's toolkit.

In this study, the researchers demonstrated
the BSIT phenomenon using nothing more complicated
than a glass micro-fiber and a glass sphere adjacent
to it.

"Light at certain wavelengths can be absorbed
out of a thin optical waveguide by a
microresonator--which is essentially a tiny glass
sphere--when they are brought very close," explained
Gaurav Bahl, an assistant professor of mechanical
science and engineering at Illinois. "Through the
BSIT phenomenon we can eliminate this opacity, i.e.,
we can make this system transparent again by adding
another laser at a specially chosen wavelength
nearby.

"The effect occurs due to the interaction of
the light with sound waves present in the material,
and is a new physical process that has never been
seen before. The most significant aspect of our
discovery is the observation that BSIT is a
non-reciprocal phenomenon--the transparency is only
generated one way. In the other direction, the
system still absorbs light."

Time-reversal symmetry (i.e. reciprocity) is a
fundamental tenet understood in most acoustic,
electromagnetic, and thermodynamic contexts.
Engineers are often forced to use tricks to break
this time-reversal symmetry for specific device
applications.

Current non-reciprocal optical devices--for
example, isolators and circulators--are exclusively
built using the Faraday magneto-optic effect. This
method uses magnetic fields to break the
time-reversal symmetry with certain specialized
garnet and ferrite materials.

However, these materials are challenging to
obtain at the chip-scale through conventional
foundry processes. Magnetic fields are also sources
of interference in many applications such as cold
atom microsystems. These constraints have deterred
availability of Faraday effect isolators for on-chip
optical systems till date.

"We have demonstrated a method of obtaining
linear optical non-reciprocity that requires no
magnets, can be implemented in any common optical
material system without needing ferrites, and could
be implemented today in any commercial optical
foundry," Bahl added. "Brillouin isolators do
already exist, but they are nonlinear devices
requiring filtering of the scattered light. BSIT, on
the other hand, is a linear non-reciprocal
mechanism."

"Brillouin-Mandelstam scattering, originally
discovered in the early 1920s, is the coupling of
light waves and sound waves through electrostrictive
optical forces and acousto-optic scattering. It is
the fundamental physical process behind BSIT, and
occurs in all solids, liquids, gases, and even
plasmas," stated JunHwan Kim, a graduate student at
Illinois and first author of the paper,
"Non-Reciprocal Brillouin Scattering Induced
Transparency," appearing in the journal, Nature
Physics.

BSIT also enables the speeding up and slowing
down of the group velocity of light. Physicists call
this "fast" and "slow" light. "Slow" light
techniques are extremely useful for quantum
information storage and optical buffer applications.
Some day, such buffers could be incorporated in
quantum computers.

"While it is already known that the slow and
fast light can be obtained using Brillouin
scattering, our device is far smaller and uses far
less power than any other previous demonstration, by
several orders-of-magnitude. However, we must
sacrifice bandwidth to obtain such performance," Kim
added.

In their studies, Bahl's research group uses
the extremely minute forces exerted by light to
generate and control mechanical vibrations of
microscale and nanoscale devices--a field called
optomechanics. In resonant microcavities, these
miniscule forces can be enhanced by many orders of
magnitude. They are using these phenomena to unearth
new physics behind how solids, liquids, and gases
interact with light.

Berkeley CA (SPX) Jan 29, 2015 - Ever since Einstein
proposed his special theory of relativity in 1905,
physics and cosmology have been based on the
assumption that space looks the same in all
directions - that it's not squeezed in one direction
relative to another.

A new experiment by University of California,
Berkeley, physicists used partially entangled atoms
- identical to the qubits in a quantum computer - to
demonstrate more precisely than ever before that
this is true, to one part in a billion billion.

The classic experiment that inspired Albert
Einstein was performed in Cleveland by Albert
Michelson and Edward Morley in 1887 and disproved
the existence of an "ether" permeating space through
which light was thought to move like a wave through
water. What it also proved, said Hartmut Haffner, a
UC Berkeley assistant professor of physics, is that
space is isotropic and that light travels at the
same speed up, down and sideways.

"Michelson and Morley proved that space is not
squeezed," Haffner said. "This isotropy is
fundamental to all physics, including the Standard
Model of physics. If you take away isotropy, the
whole Standard Model will collapse. That is why
people are interested in testing this."

The Standard Model of particle physics
describes how all fundamental particles interact,
and requires that all particles and fields be
invariant under Lorentz transformations, and in
particular that they behave the same no matter what
direction they move.

Haffner and his team conducted an experiment
analogous to the Michelson-Morley experiment, but
with electrons instead of photons of light. In a
vacuum chamber he and his colleagues isolated two
calcium ions, partially entangled them as in a
quantum computer, and then monitored the electron
energies in the ions as Earth rotated over 24 hours.

If space were squeezed in one or more
directions, the energy of the electrons would change
with a 12-hour period. It didn't, showing that space
is in fact isotropic to one part in a billion
billion (1018), 100 times better than previous
experiments involving electrons, and five times
better than experiments like Michelson and Morley's
that used light.

The results disprove at least one theory that
extends the Standard Model by assuming some
anisotropy of space, he said.

Haffner and his colleagues, including former
graduate student Thaned Pruttivarasin, now at the
Quantum Metrology Laboratory in Saitama, Japan, will
report their findings in the Jan. 29 issue of the
journal Nature.

Entangled qubits
Haffner came up with the idea of using entangled
ions to test the isotropy of space while building
quantum computers, which involve using ionized atoms
as quantum bits, or qubits, entangling their
electron wave functions, and forcing them to evolve
to do calculations not possible with today's digital
computers. It occurred to him that two entangled
qubits could serve as sensitive detectors of slight
disturbances in space.

"I wanted to do the experiment because I
thought it was elegant and that it would be a cool
thing to apply our quantum computers to a completely
different field of physics," he said. "But I didn't
think we would be competitive with experiments being
performed by people working in this field. That was
completely out of the blue."

He hopes to make more sensitive quantum
computer detectors using other ions, such as
ytterbium, to gain another 10,000-fold increase in
the precision measurement of Lorentz symmetry. He is
also exploring with colleagues future experiments to
detect the spatial distortions caused by the effects
of dark matter particles, which are a complete
mystery despite comprising 27 percent of the mass of
the universe.

"For the first time we have used tools from
quantum information to perform a test of fundamental
symmetries, that is, we engineered a quantum state
which is immune to the prevalent noise but sensitive
to the Lorentz-violating effects," Haffner said. "We
were surprised the experiment just worked, and now
we have a fantastic new method at hand which can be
used to make very precise measurements of
perturbations of space."

Fort Davis TX (SPX) Jan 28, 2015 - A five-year
analysis of an event captured by a tiny telescope at
McDonald Observatory and followed up by telescopes
on the ground and in space has led astronomers to
believe they witnessed a giant black hole tear apart
a star. The work is published this month in The
Astrophysical Journal.

On January 21, 2009, the ROTSE IIIb telescope
at McDonald caught the flash of an extremely bright
event. The telescope's wide field of view takes
pictures of large swathes of sky every night,
looking for newly exploding stars as part of the
ROTSE Supernova Verification Project (RSVP).
Software then compares successive photos to find
bright "new" objects in the sky - transient events
like the explosion of a star or a gamma-ray burst.

With a magnitude of -22.5, this 2009 event was
as bright as the "superluminous supernovae" (a new
category of the brightest stellar explosions known)
that the ROTSE team discovered at McDonald in recent
years. The team nicknamed the 2009 event "Dougie,"
after a character in the cartoon South Park. (Its
technical name is ROTSE3J120847.9+430121.)

The team thought Dougie might be a supernova,
and set about looking for its host galaxy (which
would be much too faint for ROTSE to see). They
found that the Sloan Digital Sky Survey had mapped a
faint red galaxy at Dougie's location. The team
followed that up with new observations of the galaxy
with one of the giant Keck telescopes in Hawaii,
pinpointing the galaxy's distance at three billion
light-years.

These deductions meant Dougie had a home - but
just what was he? Team members had four
possibilities: a superluminous supernova; a merger
of two neutron stars; a gamma-ray burst; or a "tidal
disruption event" - a star being pulled apart as it
neared its host galaxy's central black hole.

To narrow it down, they studied Dougie in
various ways. They made ultraviolet observations
with the orbiting Swift telescope, and took many
spectra from the ground with the 9.2-meter
Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald.

Finally, they used computer models of how the
light from different possible physical processes
that might explain how Dougie would behave - how it
varies in brightness over time, and what chemical
signatures it might show - and compared them to
Dougie's actual behavior.

In detail, Dougie did not look like a
supernova. The neutron star merger and gamma-ray
burst possibilities were similarly eliminated.

"When we discovered this new object, it looked
similar to supernovae we had known already," said
lead author Jozsef Vinko of the University of Szeged
in Hungary. "But when we kept monitoring its light
variation, we realized that this was something
nobody really saw before. Finding out that it was
probably a supermassive black hole eating a star was
a fascinating experience," Vinko said.

Team member J. Craig Wheeler, leader of the
supernova group at The University of Texas at
Austin, elaborated. "We got the idea that it might
be a 'tidal disruption' event," he said, explaining
that means that the enormous gravity of a black hole
pulls on one side of the star harder than the other
side, creating tides that rip the star apart.

"A star wanders near a black hole, the star's
side nearer the black hole is pulled" on more than
the star's far side, he said. "These especially
large tides can be strong enough that you pull the
star out into a noodle" shape.

The star "doesn't fall directly into the black
hole," Wheeler said. "It might form a disk first.
But the black hole is destined to swallow most of
that material."

Though astronomers have seen black holes
swallow stars before - though less than a dozen
times - this one is special even in that rare
company: It's not going down easy.

Models by team members James Guillochon of
Harvard and Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, showed that the disrupted
stellar matter was generating so much radiation that
it pushed back on the infall. The black hole was
choking on the rapidly infalling matter.

Based on the characteristics of the light from
Dougie, and their deductions of the star's original
mass, the team has determined that Dougie started
out as a Sun-like star, before being ripped apart.

Their observations of the host galaxy, coupled
with Dougie's behavior, led them to surmise that the
galaxy's central black hole has the "rather modest"
mass of about a million Suns, Wheeler said.

Delving into Dougie's behavior has
unexpectedly resulted in learning more about small,
distant galaxies, Wheeler said, musing "Who knew
this little guy had a black hole?"

Singapore (SPX) Jan 27, 2015 - Lorentz invariance
(LI) is a cornerstone of modern physics, and
strongly supported by observations. In fact, all the
experiments carried out so far are consistent with
it, and no evidence to show that such a symmetry
needs to be broken at a certain energy scale.
Nevertheless, there are various reasons to construct
gravitational theories with broken LI.

In particular, our understanding of
space-times at Plank scale is still highly limited,
and the renomalizability and unitarity of gravity
often lead to the violation of LI.

One concrete example is the Horava theory of
quantum gravity, in which the LI is broken in the
ultraviolet (UV), and the theory can include
higher-dimensional spatial derivative operators, so
that the UV behavior is dramatically improved and
can be made (power-counting) renormalizable.

On the other hand, the exclusion of
high-dimensional time derivative operators prevents
the ghost instability, whereby the unitarity of the
theory -- a problem that has been faced since 1977 [
K.S. Stelle, Phys. Rev. D16, 953 (1977)] -- is
assured. In the infrared (IR) the lower dimensional
operators take over, whereby a healthy low-energy
limit is presumably resulted.

However, once LI is broken different species
of particles can travel with different velocities,
and in certain theories , such as the Horava theory
mentioned above, they can be even arbitrarily large.

This suggests that black holes may not exist
at all in such theories, as any signal initially
trapped inside a horizon can penetrate it and
propagate to infinity, as long as the signal has
sufficiently large velocity (or energy). This seems
in a sharp conflict with current observations, which
strongly suggest that black holes exist in our
universe [R. Narayan and J.E. MacClintock, Mon. Not.
R. Astron. Soc., 419, L69 (2012)].

A potential breakthrough was made recently by
Blas and Sibiryakov [D. Blas and S. Sibiryakov,
Phys. Rev. D84, 124043 (2011)], who found that there
still exist absolute causal boundaries, the
so-called universal horizons, and particles even
with infinitely large velocities would just move
around on these boundaries and cannot escape to
infinity.

This has immediately attracted lot of
attention. In particular, it was shown that the
universal horizon radiates like a blackbody at a
fixed temperature, and obeys the first law of black
hole mechanics [P. Berglund, J. Bhattacharyya, and
D. Mattingly, Phys. Rev. D85, 124019 (2012); Phys.
Rev. Lett. 110, 071301 (2013)]. The main idea is as
follows: In a given space-time, a globally timelike
foliation parametrized by a scalar field, the
so-called khronon, might exist.

Then, there is a surface at which the khronon
diverges, while physically nothing singular happens
there, including the metric and the space-time.
Given that the khronon defines an absolute time, any
object crossing this surface from the interior would
necessarily also move back in absolute time, which
is something forbidden by the definition of the
causality of the theory. Thus, even particles with
superluminal velocities cannot penetrate this
surface, once they are trapped inside it.

In all studies of universal horizons carried
out so far the khronon is part of the gravitational
theory involved. To generalize the conception of the
universal horizons to any gravitational theory with
broken LI, recently Lin, Abdalla, Cai and Wang
promoted the khronon to a test field, a similar role
played by a Killing vector, so its existence does
not affect the given space-time, but defines the
properties of it.

By this way, such a field is no longer part of
the underlaid gravitational theory and it may or may
not exist in a given space-time, depending on the
properties of the space-time considered. Then, they
showed that the universal horizons indeed exist, by
constructing concrete static charged solutions of
the Horava gravity.

More important, they showed that such horizons
exist not only in the IR limit of the theory, as has
been considered so far in the literature, but also
in the full Horava theory of gravity, that is, when
high-order operators are not negligible.

New Haven CT (SPX) Jan 24, 2015 - Yale University
astronomers have identified the first "changing
look" quasar, a gleaming object in deep space that
appears to have its own dimmer switch. The discovery
may offer a glimpse into the life story of the
universe's great beacons.

Quasars are massive, luminous objects that
draw their energy from black holes. Until now,
scientists have been unable to study both the bright
and dim phases of a quasar in a single source.

As described in an upcoming edition of The
Astrophysical Journal, Yale-led researchers spotted
a quasar that had dimmed by a factor of six or
seven, compared with observations from a few years
earlier.

"We've looked at hundreds of thousands of
quasars at this point, and now we've found one that
has switched off," said C. Megan Urry, Yale's Israel
Munson Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and
the study's principal investigator. "This may tell
us something about their lifetimes."

Stephanie LaMassa, a Yale associate research
scientist, noticed the phenomenon during an ongoing
probe of Stripe 82 -- a sliver of the sky found
along the Celestial Equator. Stripe 82 has been
scanned in numerous astronomical surveys, including
the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

"This is like a dimmer switch," LaMassa said.
"The power source just went dim. Because the life
cycle of a quasar is one of the big unknowns,
catching one as it changes, within a human lifetime,
is amazing."

Even more significant for astronomers was the
weakening of the quasar's broad emission lines.
Visible on the optical spectrum, these broad
emission lines are signatures of gas that is too
distant to be consumed by a black hole, yet close
enough to be "excited" by energy from material that
does fall into a black hole.

The change in the emission lines is what told
researchers that the black hole had essentially gone
on a diet, and was giving off less energy as a
result. That's when the "changing look" quasar hit
its dimmer switch, and most of its broad emission
lines disappeared.

The Yale team analyzed a variety of
observation data, including recent optical spectra
information and archival optical photometry and
X-ray spectra information. They needed to rule out
the possibility the quasar merely appeared to lose
brightness, due to a gas cloud or other object
passing in front of it.

The findings may prove invaluable on several
fronts. First, they provide direct information about
the intermittent nature of quasar activity; even
more intriguingly, they hint at the sporadic
activity of black holes.

"It makes a difference to know how black holes
grow," Urry said, noting that all galaxies have
black holes, and quasars are a phase that black
holes go through before becoming dormant. "This
perhaps has implications for how the Milky Way looks
today."

Additionally, there is the chance the quasar
may fire up again, showing astronomers yet another
changing look.

"Even though astronomers have been studying
quasars for more than 50 years, it's exciting that
someone like me, who has studied black holes for
almost a decade, can find something completely new,"
LaMassa said.

Berkeley CA (SPX) Jan 28, 2015 - University of
California, Berkeley, scientists have proved a
fundamental relationship between energy and time
that sets a "quantum speed limit" on processes
ranging from quantum computing and tunneling to
optical switching.

The energy-time uncertainty relationship is
the flip side of the Heisenberg uncertainty
principle, which sets limits on how precisely you
can measure position and speed, and has been the
bedrock of quantum mechanics for nearly 100 years.
It has become so well-known that it has infected
literature and popular culture with the idea that
the act of observing affects what we observe.

Not long after German physicist Werner
Heisenberg, one of the pioneers of quantum
mechanics, proposed his relationship between
position and speed, other scientists deduced that
energy and time were related in a similar way,
implying limits on the speed with which systems can
jump from one energy state to another.

The most common application of the energy-time
uncertainty relationship has been in understanding
the decay of excited states of atoms, where the
minimum time it takes for an atom to jump to its
ground state and emit light is related to the
uncertainty of the energy of the excited state.

"This is the first time the energy-time
uncertainty principle has been put on a rigorous
basis - our arguments don't appeal to experiment,
but come directly from the structure of quantum
mechanics," said chemical physicist K. Birgitta
Whaley, director of the Berkeley Quantum Information
and Computation Center and a UC Berkeley professor
of chemistry. "Before, the principle was just kind
of thrown into the theory of quantum mechanics."

The new derivation of the energy-time
uncertainty has application for any measurement
involving time, she said, particularly in estimating
the speed with which certain quantum processes -
such as calculations in a quantum computer - will
occur.

"The uncertainty principle really limits how
precise your clocks can be," said first author Ty
Volkoff, a graduate student who just received his
Ph.D. in chemistry from UC Berkeley. "In a quantum
computer, it limits how fast you can go from one
state to the other, so it puts limits on the clock
speed of your computer."

The new proof could even affect recent
estimates of the computational power of the
universe, which rely on the energy-time uncertainty
principle.

Volkoff and Whaley included the derivation of
the uncertainty principle in a larger paper devoted
to a detailed analysis of distinguishable quantum
states that appeared online Dec. 18 in the journal
Physical Review A.

The problem of precision measurement
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, proposed in
1927, states that it's impossible to measure
precisely both the position and speed - or more
properly, momentum - of an object. That is, the
uncertainty in measurement of the position times the
uncertainty in measurement of momentum will always
be greater than or equal to Planck's constant.
Planck's constant is an extremely small number
(6.62606957 + 10-34 square meter-kilogram/second)
that describes the graininess of space.

To physicists, an equally useful principle
relates the uncertainties of measuring both time and
energy: The variance of the energy of a quantum
state times the lifetime of the state cannot be less
than Planck's constant.

"When students first learn about time-energy
uncertainty, they learn about the lifetime of atomic
states or emission line widths in spectroscopy,
which are very physical but empirical notions,"
Volkoff said.

This observed relationship was first addressed
mathematically in a 1945 paper by two Russian
physicists who dealt only with transitions between
two obviously distinct energy states.

The new analysis by Volkoff and Whaley applies
to all types of experiments, including those in
which the beginning and end states may not be
entirely distinct. The analysis allows scientists to
calculate how long it will take for such states to
be distinguishable from one another at any level of
certainty.

"In many experiments that examine the time
evolution of a quantum state, the experimenters are
dealing with endpoints where the states are not
completely distinguishable," Volkoff said. "But you
couldn't determine the minimum time that process
would take from our current understanding of the
energy-time uncertainty."

Most experiments dealing with light, as in the
fields of spectroscopy and quantum optics, involve
states that are not entirely distinct, he said.
These states evolve on time scales of the order of
femtoseconds - millionths of a billionth of a
second.

Alternatively, scientists working on quantum
computers aim to establish entangled quantum states
that evolve and perform a computation with speeds on
the order of nanoseconds.

"Our analysis reveals that a minimal finite
length of time must elapse in order to achieve a
given success rate for distinguishing an initial
quantum state from its time-evolved image using an
optimal measurement," Whaley said.

The new analysis could help determine the
times required for quantum tunneling, such as the
tunneling of electrons through the band-gap of a
semiconductor or the tunneling of atoms in
biological proteins.

It also could be useful in a new field called
"weak measurement," which involves tracking small
changes in a quantum system, such as entangled
qubits in a quantum computer, as the system evolves.
No one measurement sees a state that is purely
distinct from the previous state.

Trieste, Italy (SPX) Jan 22, 2015 - "If we combine
the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the
most recent Big Bang model to explain the universe
and we hypothesise the existence of space-time
tunnels, what we get is that our galaxy could really
contain one of these tunnels, and that the tunnel
could even be the size of the galaxy itself. But
there's more", explains Paolo Salucci,
astrophysicist of the International School for
Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste and a dark
matter expert.

"We could even travel through this tunnel,
since, based on our calculations, it could be
navigable. Just like the one we've all seen in the
recent film 'Interstellar'". Salucci is among the
authors of the paper recently published in Annals of
Physics.

Although space-time tunnels (or wormholes or
Einstein-Penrose bridges) have only recently gained
great popularity among the public thanks to
Christopher Nolan's sci-fi film, they have been the
focus of astrophysicists' attention for many years.

"What we tried to do in our study was to solve
the very equation that the astrophysicist 'Murph'
was working on. Clearly we did it long before the
film came out" jokes Salucci. "It is, in fact, an
extremely interesting problem for dark matter
studies".

"Obviously we're not claiming that our galaxy
is definitely a wormhole, but simply that, according
to theoretical models, this hypothesis is a
possibility". Can it ever be tested experimentally?
"In principle, we could test it by comparing two
galaxies - our galaxy and another, very close one
like, for example, the Magellanic Cloud, but we are
still very far from any actual possibility of making
such a comparison".

To reach their conclusions the astrophysicists
combined the equations of general relativity with an
extremely detailed map of the distribution of dark
matter in the Milky Way: "the map was one we
obtained in a study we carried out in 2013",
explains Salucci. "Beyond the sci-fi hypothesis, our
research is interesting because it proposes a more
complex reflection on dark matter".

As Salucci points out, scientists have long
tried to explain dark matter by hypothesising the
existence of a particular particle, the neutralino,
which, however, has never been identified at CERN or
observed in the universe. But alternative theories
also exist that don't rely on the particle, "and
perhaps it's time for scientists to take this issue
'seriously'", concludes Salucci.

"Dark matter may be 'another dimension',
perhaps even a major galactic transport system. In
any case, we really need to start asking ourselves
what it is".

Bonn, Germany (SPX) Jan 23, 2015 - If two children
splash in the sea high water waves will emerge due
to constructive superposition. Different
observations are made for the microscopic world in
an experiment at the University of Bonn, where
physicists used a laser beam to generate light waves
from two cesium atoms.

The light waves were reflected back from two
parallel mirrors. It turned out that this
experimental arrangement suppressed the emergence of
high light waves. With their results, which are
published now in the "Physical Review Letters", the
scientists observed the most fundamental scenario of
light-matter interaction with two atoms.

The physicists at the University of Bonn
confined two levitating cesium atoms in a light cage
for photons. A laser beam continuously irradiated
the two atoms, which scattered the laser light
similar to levitating dust in a sunbeam. The
scattered light waves superimpose and were reflected
back onto the atoms by two parallel mirrors.

"We expected that two atoms in such a cage
would behave differently from a single atom" says
first author Dr. Rene Reimann, colleague of Prof.
Dr. Dieter Meschede at the "Institut fur Angewandte
Physik", University of Bonn.

This matches with our everyday experience: Two
splashing children in the sea produce different
water waves than a single child. However, for the
light cage with the light waves emitted from the two
atoms the analogy to the splashing children in the
sea does not fully hold. Here no high light waves
are observed.

Backaction suppresses high light waves
The surprising situation of the two atoms inside the
light cage can be illustrated with two children in a
swimming pool instead of the sea. Here the children
create water waves that are partially reflected from
the pool edge. Now the reflected waves and the
forward running waves cancel each other.

"Due to this feedback two children can in the
best case generate barely higher waves than a single
child". Albeit by changing the distance between
them, the kids in the pool can change the height of
the water waves.

Keeping this in mind one can understand the
situation of the two cesium atoms in the experiment:
Even in the best case when the light waves of the
two atoms constructively interfere barely more
photons could be counted compared to the one atom
case. "It became clear that the mirrors introduce a
strong backaction that hinders the emergence of high
light waves", describes Dieter Meschede.

New insights in light-matter interaction
Nevertheless minimal position changes of the
levitating cesium atoms in the light cage can be
detected through distinct changes in the height of
the superimposed light waves.

"Up to now this was not possible. Now, this
opens up new insights and experimental possibilities
for the light-atom interaction of two-atom systems",
says Rene Reimann. These new possibilities could
support forward-looking technologies like quantum
memories and quantum networks for telecommunication
and computation.

So far, international teams of scientists
observed the interaction of a single or many atoms
with photons in a light cage. For his fundamental
contributions to this research, Serge Haroche was
awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2012.

Now, the physicists from Bonn achieved to
observe the interaction of exactly two atoms in a
light cage. "With this experiment the most
fundamental case of collective light-matter
interaction has been realized", says Dieter
Meschede.

The research group "Quantum Technologies" at
the University of Bonn experimentally investigates
the controlled interaction between atoms and light.
The group is focusing on the generation of
particular quantum mechanical states.

Warsaw, Poland (SPX) Jan 23, 2015 - Individual
protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei turn out not
to behave according to the predictions made by
existing theoretical models. This surprising
conclusion, reached by an international team of
physicists including staff members from the Faculty
of Physics at the University of Warsaw (UW), forces
us to reconsider how we have been describing large
atomic nuclei for the past several decades.

Atomic nuclei shape the nature of our reality:
around 99.9% of the mass of all matter is contained
within them. Yet in spite of their ubiquity and
significance, they still remain relatively poorly
understood by contemporary physics.

The main barrier to formulating a consistent
theoretical description of atomic nuclei is the
complexity of the interactions between their
component particles, namely protons and neutrons.
The situation becomes even more complicated when the
nucleus contains a high number of particles.

Writing in the prestigious physics journal
Physical Review Letters, a team of scientists from
Poland (UW Faculty of Physics), Finland and Sweden
have demonstrated that we have to modify the
existing model of atomic nuclei containing a
significant and almost magic number of both protons
and neutrons.

"We have shown that one of the two main
physical factors taken into consideration in our
models of certain large atomic nuclei is not
actually all that significant. In practice, this
means that the physics of such nuclei operate in a
slightly different way than previously thought,"
says Prof. Jacek Dobaczewski from the Institute of
Theoretical Physics at the UW Faculty of Physics.

When physicists describe the motion of
electrons in atoms, they generally assume that they
move in an electrostatic field originating from the
neighbouring electrons and from the distant atomic
nucleus.

The model predicts the formation of distinct
electron shells with different capacities: the first
can fit the maximum of 2 electrons, with 8 on the
second, 18 on the third, and so on. Physicists also
apply a similar model to the atomic nuclei
themselves; however, this is made more difficult by
the complex interactions between subatomic particles
within the nucleus.

"In atoms, each electron is located at a great
distance from other electrons and the atomic
nucleus. As such, we can safely assume that distinct
electrons move in a single, averaged field of
interactions originating from the remaining atomic
components.

However, protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei
are very close together, and they all exist in a
field which they also actively shape," explains Dr.
Dimitar Tarpanov (University of Warsaw).

As is the case with electrons, the
averaged-field model predicts the existence of
shells within the nucleus - shells with the greatest
probability of a proton or a neutron being found
there. Subsequent nuclear shells are complete when
they contain 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126 protons
(the same numbers apply to neutron shells).
Additional filled shells appear at levels 114, 120
and 126 for protons, and 184 for neutrons.

These are known as "magic" numbers; an atomic
nucleus is dubbed as being "double magic" when it
contains a magic number of protons alongside a magic
number of neutrons.

The researchers were especially interested in
situations where an atomic nucleus is in an almost
double magic state: one of the shells is complete,
whereas the next, outermost shell contains just a
single proton or neutron. The question was, what
interactions will determine the motion of this
"lonely" particle?

For several decades now, in order to remain
consistent with measurements taken in physics
laboratories around the globe, in addition to the
averaged field the existing model of large atomic
nuclei has taken account of additional effects: the
vibrations and motions of nucleons caused by quantum
effects.

In certain cases, such vibrations may even
affect the appearance of a nucleus by flattening it
slightly or rendering it pear-shaped. Such
modifications would also have to affect the field of
motion of a solitary proton or neutron moving in the
outermost shell of the atomic nucleus.

Physicists have used experimental data
available for double magic nuclei of oxygen 16O,
calcium 40Ca and 48Ca, nickel 56Ni, tin 132Sn and
lead 208Pb, as well as for nearly double magic
nuclei such as 207Pb and 209Pb. The data were used
to precisely fit various parameters used in the
existing model.

Theoretical analysis leaves no doubt: quantum
effects and the vibrations that go with them turn
out to have a significantly lower effect on the
motion of individual particles in the nuclear shell
than previously thought.

"This is a fascinating result. Since quantum
effects in a nucleus as large as 209Pb are not
terribly significant, that means that the existing
model of the average field itself does not fully
reflect reality. There is something we are failing
to take into account. I wonder what that is...?"
adds Prof. Dobaczewski.

Such work on devising a precise and consistent
description of phenomena occurring in light, heavy
and superheavy atomic nuclei has significant
practical applications. Our understanding of the
physics of atomic nuclei is used in the construction
of nuclear power plants, the design of future
thermonuclear power plants, the military, nuclear
medicine, tissue imaging, and in diagnostics and
cancer therapies.

Furthermore, nuclear processes and
interactions are fundamental to the way we describe
stars in the Universe. Theoretical methods developed
to describe the interactions of many particles in
atomic nuclei also have numerous applications in
nuclear physics and condensed matter physics, and
also in quantum chemistry, in the spectral analysis
of excited states of atomic nuclei, atoms and
molecules.

The research has been financed through the
ENSAR project ran as part of EU's FP7, Poland's
National Science Centre, Finland's FIDIPRO academic
programme, and the Bulgarian Research Fund.

Physics and Astronomy first appeared at the
University of Warsaw in 1816, under the then Faculty
of Philosophy. In 1825 the Astronomical Observatory
was established. Currently, the Faculty of Physics'
Institutes include Experimental Physics, Theoretical
Physics, Geophysics, Department of Mathematical
Methods and an Astronomical Observatory.

Research covers almost all areas of modern
physics, on scales from the quantum to the
cosmological. The Faculty's research and teaching
staff includes ca. 200 university teachers, of which
88 are employees with the title of professor. The
Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, is
attended by ca. 1000 students and more than 170
doctoral students.

Bonn, Germany (SPX) Jan 21, 2015 - Can a penalty
kick simultaneously score a goal and miss? For very
small objects, at least, this is possible: according
to the predictions of quantum mechanics, microscopic
objects can take different paths at the same time.
The world of macroscopic objects follows other
rules: the football always moves in a definite
direction. But is this always correct?

Physicists of the University of Bonn have
constructed an experiment designed to possibly
falsify this thesis. Their first experiment shows
that Caesium atoms can indeed take two paths at the
same time.

Almost 100 years ago physicists Werner
Heisenberg, Max Born und Erwin Schrodinger created a
new field of physics: quantum mechanics. Objects of
the quantum world - according to quantum theory - no
longer move along a single well-defined path.

Rather, they can simultaneously take different
paths and end up at different places at once.
Physicists speak of quantum superposition of
different paths.

At the level of atoms, it looks as if objects
indeed obey quantum mechanical laws. Over the years,
many experiments have confirmed quantum mechanical
predictions. In our macroscopic daily experience,
however, we witness a football flying along exactly
one path; it never strikes the goal and misses at
the same time. Why is that so?

"There are two different interpretations,"
says Dr. Andrea Alberti of the Institute of Applied
Physics of the University of Bonn.

"Quantum mechanics allows superposition states
of large, macroscopic objects. But these states are
very fragile, even following the football with our
eyes is enough to destroy the superposition and
makes it follow a definite trajectory."

Do "large" objects play by different rules?
But it could also be that footballs obey completely
different rules than those applying for single
atoms. "Let us talk about the macro-realistic view
of the world," Alberti explains.

"According to this interpretation, the ball
always moves on a specific trajectory, independent
of our observation, and in contrast to the atom."

But which of the two interpretations is
correct? Do "large" objects move differently from
small ones? In collaboration with Dr. Clive Emary of
the University of Hull in the U.K., the Bonn team
has come up with an experimental scheme that may
help to answer this question. "The challenge was to
develop a measurement scheme of the atoms' positions
which allows one to falsify macro-realistic
theories," adds Alberti.

The physicists describe their research in the
journal Physical Review X: With two optical tweezers
they grabbed a single Caesium atom and pulled it in
two opposing directions. In the macro-realist's
world the atom would then be at only one of the two
final locations. Quantum-mechanically, the atom
would instead occupy a superposition of the two
positions.

"We have now used indirect measurements to
determine the final position of the atom in the most
gentle way possible," says the PhD student Carsten
Robens. Even such an indirect measurement (see
figure) significantly modified the result of the
experiments. This observation excludes - falsifies,
as Karl Popper would say more precisely - the
possibility that Caesium atoms follow a
macro-realistic theory.

Instead, the experimental findings of the Bonn
team fit well with an interpretation based on
superposition states that get destroyed when the
indirect measurement occurs. All that we can do is
to accept that the atom has indeed taken different
paths at the same time.

"This is not yet a proof that quantum
mechanics hold for large objects," cautions Alberti.
"The next step is to separate the Caesium atom's two
positions by several millimetres. Should we still
find the superposition in our experiment, the
macro-realistic theory would suffer another
setback."

Chicago IL (SPX) Jan 23, 2015 - University of
Chicago scientists have experimentally observed for
the first time a phenomenon in ultracold, three-atom
molecules predicted by Russian theoretical
physicsist Vitaly Efimov in 1970. In this quantum
phenomenon, called geometric scaling, the triatomic
molecules fit inside one another like an infinitely
large set of Russian nesting dolls.

"This is a new rule in chemistry that
molecular sizes can follow a geometric series, like
1, 2, 4, 8...," said Cheng Chin, professor in
physics at UChicago. "In our case, we find three
molecular states in this sequence where one
molecular state is about 5 times larger than the
previous one."

Chin and four members of his research group
published their findings Dec. 9, 2014, in Physical
Review Letters.

"Quantum theory makes the existence of these
gigantic molecules inevitiable, provided proper--and
quite challenging--conditions are created," said
Efimov, now at the University of Washington.

The UChicago team observed three molecules in
the series, consisting of one lithim atom and two
cesium atoms in a vacuum chamber at the ultracold
temperature of approximately 200 nanokelvin, a tiny
fraction of a degree above absolute zero (minus
459.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Infinitely large molecules
Given an infinitely large universe, the number of
increasingly larger molecules in this cesium-lithium
system also would extend to infinity. This
remarkable idea stems from the exotic nature of
quantum mechanics, which conforms confirms to
different laws of physics than those that govern the
universe on a macroscopic scale.

"These are certainly exotic molecules," said
Shih-Kuang Tung, the postdoctoral scholar, now at
Northwestern University, who led the project. Only
under strict conditions could Tung and his
colleagues see the geometric scaling in their Efimov
molecules. It appears that neither two-atom nor
four-atom molecules can achieve the Efimov state.
"There's a special case for three atoms," Chin said.

Efimov's reaction to the research was twofold.
"First, I am amazed by the predictive power of the
quantum theory," he said. "Second, I am amazed by
the skill of the experimentalists who managed to
create those challenging conditions."

The finding is important because it shows that
Efimov molecules, like other complex phenomena in
nature, follow a simple mathematical rule. One other
example in nature that displays geometric scaling
are snowflakes, rooted in the microscopic physics of
their hexagonal crystal structure.

A team at the University of Innsbruck in
Austria, which included Chin, experimentally
observed the first Efimov molecular state in 2006 in
molecules consisting of three cesium atoms. In this
Efimov state, three cesium atoms become entangled at
temperatures slightly above absolute zero. They form
a Borromean ring of three interlocking circles. Any
two of them, however, will not interlock.

Chin switched his interest to lithium-cesium
molecules in 2010 because observing geometrical
scaling in the cesium system presented severe
experimental difficulties.

Scaling factor
"The difficulty is that based on what we understand
of Efimov's theory, the scaling factor is predicted
to be 22.7 for the cesium system, which is a very
large number," explained Chin, who also is a member
of UChicago's James Franck and Enrico Fermi
institutes. Scaling at such a large value demands an
extremely low temperature, challenging to reach
experimentally.

But the scaling factor of the lithium-cesium
triatomic molecule was predicted to be more
managable of 4.8. Indeed, after setting up their
experiment, "We were able to see three of them at a
more accessible temperature of 200 nano-Kelvin,"
Chin said. "Their sizes are measured to be 17, 86
and 415 nano-meters, respectively. They closely
follow a geometric progression with the predicted
scaling factor."

But even the lithium-cesium system presented a
difficulty: the significantly differing masses of
the two elements, which was critical for observing
multiple Efimov states. Lithium is one of the
lightest elements on the periodic table, while
cesium is quite heavy. "One is really massive
compared to the other," Tung said.

He compared working both elements into an
ultracold experiment to dangling a monkey and an
elephant from springs. They would hang at different
levels, but they still needed to interact.

In the experiment, the UChicago physicists
lowered the temperatures of the lithium and ceisum
atoms separately, then brought them together to form
the triatomic, Efimov molecules.

"It's a very complicated experiment," Tung
said, one requiring an ultracold experimental tool
called Feshbach resonance. Carried out in a magnetic
field, Feshbach resonance allowed researchers to
bind and control the interactions between the cesium
and lithium atoms.

Cold atoms are subject to manipulation via
Feshbach resonance, which allows the observation of
geometric scaling. "Feshbach resonance is a really
important tool for us," Tung said. He and his
associates learned how to wield the tool effectively
in the past three years.

"We needed to tune the Feshbach resonances
very carefully in order to generate these Efimov
molecules," Tung said.

The efforts culminated in experimental
success. Efimov said the results made him feel like
the parent of a successful child. "The parent is
proud of the child's achievement, and he is also
pround that in a sense he is part of the child's
success."

Boston MA (SPX) Jan 19, 2015 - Two teams of
astronomers led by researchers at the University of
Cambridge have looked back nearly 13 billion years,
when the Universe was less than 10 percent its
present age, to determine how quasars - extremely
luminous objects powered by supermassive black holes
with the mass of a billion suns - regulate the
formation of stars and the build-up of the most
massive galaxies.

Using a combination of data gathered from
powerful radio telescopes and supercomputer
simulations, the teams found that a quasar spits out
cold gas at speeds up to 2000 kilometres per second,
and across distances of nearly 200,000 light years -
much farther than has been observed before.

How this cold gas - the raw material for star
formation in galaxies - can be accelerated to such
high speeds had remained a mystery. Detailed
comparison of new observations and supercomputer
simulations has only now allowed researchers to
understand how this can happen: the gas is first
heated to temperatures of tens of millions of
degrees by the energy released by the supermassive
black hole powering the quasar.

This enormous build-up of pressure accelerates
the hot gas and pushes it to the outskirts of the
galaxy.

The supercomputer simulations show that on its
way out of the parent galaxy, there is just enough
time for some of the hot gas to cool to temperatures
low enough to be observable with radio telescopes.
The results are presented in two separate papers
published in the journals Monthly Notices of the
Royal Astronomical Society and Astronomy and
Astrophysics.

Quasars are amongst the most luminous objects
in the Universe, and the most distant quasars are so
far away that they allow us to peer back billions of
years in time. They are powered by supermassive
black holes at the centre of galaxies, surrounded by
a rapidly spinning disk-like region of gas. As the
black hole pulls in matter from its surroundings,
huge amounts of energy are released.

"It is the first time that we have seen
outflowing cold gas moving at these large speeds at
such large distances from the supermassive black
hole," said Claudia Cicone, a PhD student at
Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory and Kavli Institute
for Cosmology, and lead author on the first of the
two papers. "It is very difficult to have matter
with temperatures this low move as fast as we
observed."

Cicone's observations allowed the second team
of researchers specialising in supercomputer
simulations to develop a detailed theoretical model
of the outflowing gas around a bright quasar.

"We found that while gas is launched out of
the quasar at very high temperatures, there is
enough time for some of it to cool through radiative
cooling - similar to how the Earth cools down on a
cloudless night," said Tiago Costa, a PhD student at
the Institute of Astronomy and the Kavli Institute
for Cosmology, and lead author on the second paper.

"The amazing thing is that in this distant
galaxy in the young Universe the conditions are just
right for enough of the fast moving hot gas to cool
to the low temperatures that Claudia and her team
have found."

Working at the IRAM Plateau De Bure
interferometer in the French Alps, the researchers
gathered data in the millimetre band, which allows
observation of the emission from the cold gas which
is the primary fuel for star formation and main
ingredient of galaxies, but is almost invisible at
other wavelengths.

Vienna, Austria (SPX) Jan 15, 2015 - It is easy to
measure electric current. But it is extremely hard
to watch the individual electrons which make up this
current. Electrons race through the metal with a
speed of several million meters per second, and the
distance they have to cover between two adjacent
atoms is very small. This means that tiny time
intervals have to be resolved in order to watch the
electrons dashing through the metal.

Measurements in Garching (Germany) and
theoretical calculations at the Vienna University of
Technology (Austria) have now made this possible. As
it turns out, the motion of the electrons in the
metal is remarkably similar to ballistic motion in
free space. The results have now been published in
the journal "Nature".

The Tiny Timescales of the Quantum World
Albert Einstein already explained the "photoelectric
effect" in 1905: light transfers energy to an
electron, removing it from the metal. This happens
so fast that for a long time it seemed impossible to
study the time evolution of this process. In recent
years, however, attosecond physics has advanced
dramatically, so that time resolved analysis of this
process has become possible.

An attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of
a second (10^-18 seconds). This is approximately the
time it takes light to travel the distance from one
atom to the next. Using ultrashort laser pulses,
time can now be measured with a precision in the
attosecond range.

The data which has now been published in
"Nature" was measured at the Max Planck Institute
for Quantum Optics in Garching, in a collaboration
with TU Munich, the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin,
the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and
Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg and LMU Munich. At the
Vienna University of Technology, theoretical models
and large-scale computer simulations have been
developed, in order to analyse and interpret the
results.

Racing Electrons
"The experiment allows us to watch a race of
electrons", says Professor Joachim Burgdorfer (TU
Vienna). Two different metals - tungsten and
magnesium - are stacked and hit with a laser pulse.
Either in the magnesium or in the tungsten layer,
the light can remove electrons, which then find
their way to the surface. The distance the electrons
have to cover is less than a nanometer, but still it
is possible to quantify the lead of the electrons
from the magnesium layer, arriving shortly before
the electrons from the tungsten layer.

The distance of this race can be tuned: one to
five atomic layers of magnesium are deposited on
tungsten.

"The thicker the magnesium layer, the larger
the lead of its electrons compared to the electrons
coming from the tungsten layer", says Christoph
Lemell (TU Vienna). The simple relationship between
layer thickness and arrival time shows that the
electrons travel through the metal ballistically, on
rather undisturbed and straight lines. Complex
scattering processes do not play an important role
on theses time and length scales.

For precise timing, it is crucial to have a
very well defined finish line. For the photo-finish,
a second laser was used. It influences the electrons
the moment they left the metal, but not before. The
laser beam must not penetrate the metal.

"Within a distance shorter than the spacing
between the metal atoms, the intensity of the laser
field changes dramatically", says Georg Wachter (TU
Vienna). The field of the laser beam is reduced to
almost zero in the outermost layer, whereas right
outside the metal the electrons immediately enter a
strong laser field. This sharp contrast is the
reason these extremely precise time measurements
become possible.

The new findings are expected to help with the
miniaturization of electronic and photonic elements
- and they are another proof for the amazing
possibilities of attosecond physics. "This new area
of research gives us new methods to develop quantum
technologies and study fundamental questions of
materials science and electronics", says Joachim
Burgdorfer.

Munich, Germany (SPX) Jan 15, 2015 - The time
frames, in which electrons travel within atoms, are
unfathomably short. For example, electrons excited
by light change their quantum-mechanical location
within mere attoseconds - an attosecond corresponds
to a billionth of a billionth of a second.

But how fast do electrons whiz across
distances corresponding to the diameter of
individual atomic layers? Such distances are but a
few billionths of a meter. An international team of
researchers led by Reinhard Kienberger, Professor
for Laser and X-Ray Physics at the TUM and Head of a
Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of
Quantum Optics investigated the travel times of
electrons over these extremely short distances.

To do so, the physicists applied a defined
number of layers of magnesium atoms on top of a
tungsten crystal. The researchers directed two
pulses of light at these samples.

The first pulse lasted approximately 450
attoseconds, at frequencies within the extreme
ultraviolet. This light pulse penetrated the
material and released an electron from a magnesium
atom in the layer system as well as from an atom in
the underlying tungsten crystal. Both the electrons
that were set free stemmed from the immediate
vicinity of the nucleus.

Once released, the "tungsten electron" and the
"magnesium electron" travelled through the crystal
to the surface at which point they left the solid
body. (electrons from the tungsten crystal managed
to penetrate up to four layers of magnesium atoms.)
There, the particles were captured by the electric
field of the second pulse, an infrared wave train
lasting less than five femtoseconds.

As the "tungsten electron" and the "magnesium
electron" reached the surface at different times due
to different path lengths, they experienced the
second pulse of infrared light at different times.

That is, they were exposed to different
strengths of the oscillating electric field. As a
result, both particles were accelerated to varying
degrees. From the resulting differences in the
energy of the electrons, the researchers were able
to determine how long an electron needed to pass
through a single layer of atoms.

The measurements showed that upon release a
"tungsten electron" possesses a speed of about 5000
kilometers per second. When travelling through a
layer of magnesium atoms it is delayed by
approximately 40 attoseconds, i.e., this is exactly
the time required to travel through this layer.

The experiments provide insight into how
electrons move within the widely unknown microcosm.

Knowing how fast an electron travels from one
place to the next is of substantial importance for
many applications: "While a large number of
electrons are able to cover increasingly large
distances in today's transistors, for example,
individual electrons could transmit a signal through
nanostructures in future", explains Prof. Reinhard
Kienberger.

"As a result, electronic devices like
computers could be made to be several times faster
and smaller."

Pasadena CA (SPX) Jan 13, 2015 - The central regions
of many glittering galaxies, our own Milky Way
included, harbor cores of impenetrable
darkness-black holes with masses equivalent to
millions, or even billions, of suns. What is more,
these supermassive black holes and their host
galaxies appear to develop together, or co-evolve.

Theory predicts that as galaxies collide and
merge, growing ever more massive, so too do their
dark hearts. Black holes by themselves are
impossible to see, but their gravity can pull in
surrounding gas to form a swirling band of material
called an accretion disk.

The spinning particles are accelerated to
tremendous speeds and release vast amounts of energy
in the form of heat and powerful X-rays and gamma
rays. When this process happens to a supermassive
black hole, the result is a quasar-an extremely
luminous object that outshines all of the stars in
its host galaxy and that is visible from across the
universe.

"Quasars are valuable probes of the evolution
of galaxies and their central black holes,"says
George Djorgovski, professor of astronomy and
director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery at
Caltech.

In the journal Nature, Djorgovski and his
collaborators report on an unusual repeating light
signal from a distant quasar that they say is most
likely the result of two supermassive black holes in
the final phases of a merger-something that is
predicted from theory but which has never been
observed before.

The discovery could help shed light on a
long-standing conundrum in astrophysics called the
"final parsec problem,"which refers to the failure
of theoretical models to predict what the final
stages of a black hole merger look like or even how
long the process might take.

"The end stages of the merger of these
supermassive black hole systems are very poorly
understood,"says the study's first author, Matthew
Graham, a senior computational scientist at Caltech.

The discovery of a system that seems to be at
this late stage of its evolution means we now have
an observational handle on what is going on.

Djorgovski and his team discovered the unusual
light signal emanating from quasar PG 1302-102 after
analyzing results from the Catalina Real-Time
Transient Survey (CRTS), which uses three ground
telescopes in the United States and Australia to
continuously monitor some 500 million celestial
light sources strewn across about 80 percent of the
night sky.

"There has never been a data set on quasar
variability that approaches this scope before,"says
Djorgovski, who directs the CRTS. "In the past,
scientists who study the variability of quasars
might only be able to follow some tens, or at most
hundreds, of objects with a limited number of
measurements. In this case, we looked at a quarter
million quasars and were able to gather a few
hundred data points for each one."

"Until now, the only known examples of
supermassive black holes on their way to a merger
have been separated by tens or hundreds of thousands
of light years,"says study coauthor Daniel Stern, a
scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "At
such vast distances, it would take many millions, or
even billions, of years for a collision and merger
to occur.

In contrast, the black holes in PG 1302-102
are, at most, a few hundredths of a light year apart
and could merge in about a million years or less.

Djorgovski and his team did not set out to
find a black hole merger. Rather, they initially
embarked on a systematic study of quasar brightness
variability in the hopes of finding new clues about
their physics.

But after screening the data using a
pattern-seeking algorithm that Graham developed, the
team found 20 quasars that seemed to be emitting
periodic optical signals.

This was surprising, because the light curves
of most quasars are chaotic-a reflection of the
random nature by which material from the accretion
disk spirals into a black hole.

"You just don't expect to see a periodic
signal from a quasar,"Graham says. "When you do, it
stands out." Of the 20 periodic quasars that CRTS
identified, PG 1302-102 was the best example. It had
a strong, clean signal that appeared to repeat every
five years or so. "It has a really nice smooth
up-and-down signal, similar to a sine wave, and that
just hasn't been seen before in a quasar,"Graham
says.

The team was cautious about jumping to
conclusions. "We approached it with skepticism but
excitement as well,"says study coauthor Eilat
Glikman, an assistant professor of physics at
Middlebury College in Vermont.

After all, it was possible that the
periodicity the scientists were seeing was just a
temporary ordered blip in an otherwise chaotic
signal. To help rule out this possibility, the
scientists pulled in data about the quasar from
previous surveys to include in their analysis.

After factoring in the historical observations
(the scientists had nearly 20 years' worth of data
about quasar PG 1302-102), the repeating signal was,
encouragingly, still there. The team's confidence
increased further after Glikman analyzed the
quasar's light spectrum.

The black holes that scientists believe are
powering quasars do not emit light, but the gases
swirling around them in the accretion disks are
traveling so quickly that they become heated into
glowing plasma.

"When you look at the emission lines in a
spectrum from an object, what you're really seeing
is information about speed-whether something is
moving toward you or away from you and how fast.
It's the Doppler effect,"Glikman says.

"With quasars, you typically have one emission
line, and that line is a symmetric curve. But with
this quasar, it was necessary to add a second
emission line with a slightly different speed than
the first one in order to fit the data. That
suggests something else, such as a second black
hole, is perturbing this system."

Avi Loeb, who chairs the astronomy department
at Harvard University, agreed with the team's
assessment that a "tight"supermassive black hole
binary is the most likely explanation for the
periodic signal they are seeing.

"The evidence suggests that the emission
originates from a very compact region around the
black hole and that the speed of the emitting
material in that region is at least a tenth of the
speed of light,"says Loeb, who did not participate
in the research.

A secondary black hole would be the simplest
way to induce a periodic variation in the emission
from that region, because a less dense object, such
as a star cluster, would be disrupted by the strong
gravity of the primary black hole.

In addition to providing an unprecedented
glimpse into the final stages of a black hole
merger, the discovery is also a testament to the
power of "big data"science, where the challenge lies
not only in collecting high-quality information but
also devising ways to mine it for useful
information.

"We're basically moving from having a few
pictures of the whole sky or repeated observations
of tiny patches of the sky to having a movie of the
entire sky all the time,"says Sterl Phinney, a
professor of theoretical physics at Caltech, who was
also not involved in the study.

Many of the objects in the movie will not be
doing anything very exciting, but there will also be
a lot of interesting ones that we missed before. It
is still unclear what physical mechanism is
responsible for the quasar's repeating light signal.

One possibility, Graham says, is that the
quasar is funneling material from its accretion disk
into luminous twin plasma jets that are rotating
like beams from a lighthouse. "If the glowing jets
are sweeping around in a regular fashion, then we
would only see them when they're pointed directly at
us. The end result is a regularly repeating
signal,"Graham says.

Another possibility is that the accretion disk
that encircles both black holes is distorted. "If
one region is thicker than the rest, then as the
warped section travels around the accretion disk, it
could be blocking light from the quasar at regular
intervals. This would explain the periodicity of the
signal that we're seeing,"Graham says.

Yet another possibility is that something is
happening to the accretion disk that is causing it
to dump material onto the black holes in a regular
fashion, resulting in periodic bursts of energy.

"Even though there are a number of viable
physical mechanisms behind the periodicity we're
seeing-either the precessing jet, warped accretion
disk or periodic dumping-these are all still
fundamentally caused by a close binary
system,"Graham says.

Along with Djorgovski, Graham, Stern, and
Glikman, additional authors on the paper, "A
possible close supermassive black hole binary in a
quasar with optical periodicity,"include Andrew
Drake, a computational scientist and co-principal
investigator of the CRTS sky survey at Caltech;
Ashish Mahabal, a staff scientist in computational
astronomy at Caltech; Ciro Donalek, a computational
staff scientist at Caltech; Steve Larson, a senior
staff scientist at the University of Arizona; and
Eric Christensen, an associate staff scientist at
the University of Arizona.

Funding for the study was provided by the
National Science Foundation.

Santa Barbara CA (SPX) Jan 13, 2015 - A team of
chemistry and materials science experts from
University of California, Santa Barbara and The Dow
Chemical Company has created a novel way to overcome
one of the major hurdles preventing the widespread
use of controlled radical polymerization.

In a global polymer industry valued in the
hundreds of billions of dollars, a technique called
Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization is emerging as
a key process for creating well-defined polymers for
a vast range of materials, from adhesives to
electronics. However, current ATRP methods by design
use metal catalysts, a major roadblock to
applications for which metal contamination is an
issue, such as materials used for biomedical
purposes.

This new method of radical polymerization
doesn't involve heavy metal catalysts like copper.
Their innovative, metal-free ATRP process uses an
organic-based photocatalyst--and light as the
stimulus for the highly controlled chemical
reaction.

"The grand challenge in ATRP has been: how can
we do this without any metals?" said Craig Hawker,
Director of the Dow Materials Institute at UC Santa
Barbara. "We looked toward developing an organic
catalyst that is highly reducing in the excited
state, and we found it in an easily prepared
catalyst, phenothiazine."

"It's "drop-in" technology for industry," said
Javier Read de Alaniz, principal investigator and
professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa
Barbara. "People are already used to the same
starting materials for ATRP, but now we have the
ability to do it without copper." Copper, even at
trace levels, is a problem for microelectronics
because it acts as a conductor, and for biological
applications because of its toxicity to organisms
and cells.

Read de Alaniz, Hawker, and postdoctoral
research Brett Fors, now with Cornell University,
led the study that was initially inspired by a
photoreactive Iridium catalyst.

Their study was recently detailed in a paper
titled "Metal-Free Atom Transfer Radical
Polymerization," published in the Journal of the
American Chemical Society. The research was made
possible by support from Dow, a research partner of
the UCSB College of Engineering.

ATRP is already used widely across dozens of
major industries, but the new metal-free rapid
polymerization process "pushes controlled radical
polymerization into new areas and new applications,"
according to Hawker. "Many processes in use today
all start with ATRP. Now this method opens doors for
a new class of organic-based photoredox catalysts."

Controlling radical polymerization processes
is critical for the synthesis of functional block
polymers. As a catalyst, phenothiazine builds block
copolymers in a sequential manner, achieving high
chain-end fidelity. This translates into a high
degree of versatility in polymer structure, as well
as an efficient process.

"Our process doesn't need heat. You can do
this at room temperature with simple LED lights,"
said Hawker. "We've had success with a range of
vinyl monomers, so this polymerization strategy is
useful on many levels."

"The development of living radical processes,
such as ATRP, is arguably one of the biggest things
to happen in polymer chemistry in the past few
decades," he added. "This new discovery will
significantly further the whole field."

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Jan 08, 2015 - Researchers
from Berlin Joint EPR Lab at Helmholtz-Zentrum
Berlin and University of Washington derived a new
set of equations that allows for calculating
electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) transition
probabilities with arbitrary alignment and
polarization of the exciting electromagnetic
radiation.

The validity of the equations could be
demonstrated with a newly designed THz-EPR
experiment at HZB's storage ring BESSY II. This
progress is relevant for a broad community of EPR
users and is published in Physical Review Letters on
January 6. 2015 (DOI
10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.010801).

Electron spins are quantum objects with
fascinating characteristics. They can be used as
sensitive probes to explore material properties at
the atomic level. Electron spins behave like tiny
magnets that can be aligned parallel or anti
parallel to an external magnetic field. Flips
between these states may be induced by
electromagnetic radiation matching the energy
difference of the spin states.

The probability for an EPR induced spin flip
critically depends on the orientation of the
magnetic component of the electromagnetic radiation
with respect to the external magnetic field. These
probabilities can be calculated, however, up to now
respective expressions have been available only for
a very limited number of experimental settings.

Set of equations for unconventional geometries
Joscha Nehrkorn, Alexander Schnegg, Karsten Holldack
(HZB) and Stefan Stoll (UW) now succeeded to lift
this restriction and derive general expressions for
the magnetic transition rates, which are valid for
any excitation configuration. The expressions apply
to arbitrary excitation geometry and work for linear
and circular polarized as well as unpolarized
radiation.

"We developed a general theory for EPR
transition rates of anisotropic spins systems and
implemented it in a freely available computer
program. Thereby, EPR users can now interpret and
predict experiments and extract highly desired
information which was not accessible recently"
explains Joscha Nehrkorn.

Tests have been successful
To test the new theoretical expressions, the authors
employed the properties of a unique THz-EPR
experiment at BESSY II. They aligned the spins of
iron atoms incorporated in small organic molecules
to a static magnetic field and excited them by
linear polarized coherent synchrotron radiation in
the THz range with varying orientations of the
magnetic component of the THz radiation.

By comparing the polarization dependence of
theoretical predicted and experimental EPR line
intensities, they could verify the newly derived
equations and determine the parities of ground and
excited high spin iron states.

"This experiment is an excellent example how
broad band THz radiation from a storage ring may be
used for very high frequency EPR applications, these
possibilities will be further boosted by BESSY VSR,
the next generation of our storage ring," states
Karsten Holldack scientist at the THz beam line.

Alexander Schnegg who coordinates the project
within a priority program (SPP 1601) of the German
Research Foundation (DFG) further outlines: "The
achieved breakthrough in EPR methodology strongly
improves the predictive power of EPR for
applications in e.g. life sciences, spintronics or
energy materials research and paves the way for
future EPR experiments with novel excitation
schemes. "

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 09, 2015 - A new high-energy
X-ray image from NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic
Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has pinpointed the true
monster of a galactic mashup. The image shows two
colliding galaxies, collectively called Arp 299,
located 134 million light-years away. Each of the
galaxies has a supermassive black hole at its heart.

NuSTAR has revealed that the black hole
located at the right of the pair is actively gorging
on gas, while its partner is either dormant or
hidden under gas and dust.

The findings are helping researchers
understand how the merging of galaxies can trigger
black holes to start feeding, an important step in
the evolution of galaxies.

"When galaxies collide, gas is sloshed around
and driven into their respective nuclei, fueling the
growth of black holes and the formation of stars,"
said Andrew Ptak of NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, lead author of a new
study accepted for publication in the Astrophysical
Journal. "We want to understand the mechanisms that
trigger the black holes to turn on and start
consuming the gas."

NuSTAR is the first telescope capable of
pinpointing where high-energy X-rays are coming from
in the tangled galaxies of Arp 299. Previous
observations from other telescopes, including NASA's
Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space
Agency's XMM-Newton, which detect lower-energy
X-rays, had indicated the presence of active
supermassive black holes in Arp 299.

However, it was not clear from those data
alone if one or both of the black holes was feeding,
or "accreting," a process in which a black hole
bulks up in mass as its gravity drags gas onto it.

The new X-ray data from NuSTAR - overlaid on a
visible-light image from NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope - show that the black hole on the right
is, in fact, the hungry one. As it feeds on gas,
energetic processes close to the black hole heat
electrons and protons to about hundreds of millions
of degrees, creating a superhot plasma, or corona,
that boosts the visible light up to high-energy
X-rays.

Meanwhile, the black hole on the left either
is "snoozing away," in what is referred to as a
quiescent, or dormant state, or is buried in so much
gas and dust that the high-energy X-rays can't
escape.

"Odds are low that both black holes are on at
the same time in a merging pair of galaxies," said
Ann Hornschemeier, a co-author of the study who
presented the results Thursday at the annual
American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
"When the cores of the galaxies get closer, however,
tidal forces slosh the gas and stars around
vigorously, and, at that point, both black holes may
turn on."

NuSTAR is ideally suited to study heavily
obscured black holes such as those in Arp 299.
High-energy X-rays can penetrate the thick gas,
whereas lower-energy X-rays and light get blocked.

Ptak said, "Before now, we couldn't pinpoint
the real monster in the merger."

Vancouver, Canada (SPX) Jan 09, 2015 - In an
interstellar race against time, astronomers have
measured the space-time warp in the gravity of a
binary star and determined the mass of a neutron
star--just before it vanished from view.

The international team, including University
of British Columbia astronomer Ingrid Stairs,
measured the masses of both stars in binary pulsar
system J1906. The pulsar spins and emits a
lighthouse-like beam of radio waves every 144
milliseconds. It orbits its companion star in a
little under four hours.

"By precisely tracking the motion of the
pulsar, we were able to measure the gravitational
interaction between the two highly compact stars
with extreme precision," says Stairs, professor of
physics and astronomy at UBC.

"These two stars each weigh more than the Sun,
but are still over 100 times closer together than
the Earth is to the Sun. The resulting extreme
gravity causes many remarkable effects."

According to general relativity, neutron stars
wobble like a spinning top as they move through the
gravitational well of a massive, nearby companion
star. Orbit after orbit, the pulsar travels through
a space-time that is curved, which impacts the
star's spin axis.

"Through the effects of the immense mutual
gravitational pull, the spin axis of the pulsar has
now wobbled so much that the beams no longer hit
Earth," explains Joeri van Leeuwen, an
astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for
Radio Astronomy, and University of Amsterdam, who
led the study.

"The pulsar is now all but invisible to even
the largest telescopes on Earth. This is the first
time such a young pulsar has disappeared through
precession. Fortunately this cosmic spinning top is
expected to wobble back into view, but it might take
as long as 160 years."

The mass of only a handful of double neutron
stars have ever been measured, with J1906 being the
youngest. It is located about 25,000 light years
from Earth. The results were published in the
Astrophysical Journal and presented at the American
Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle on January
8.

Salt Lake City UT (SPX) Jan 07, 2015 - Step outside
of your house tonight, look up towards the sky,
focus your view between the constellations of Cygnus
and Lyra, and then zoom in about 100 million light
years.

That's the home of a galaxy known as KA 1858,
which contains a black hole that BYU scientists
observed with the help of NASA and other
astrophysicists throughout the University of
California system.

The study, which appears in the Astrophysical
Journal, estimates that this black hole has a mass
of approximately 8 million times the mass of our
sun.

Originally, the NASA Kepler satellite's main
mission is to hunt for earth-like planets in our own
galaxy. In this study, however, researchers were
able to combine data from the Kepler mission with
ground-based data to observe black hole
characteristics. Many of the ground-based
observations were performed at BYU's West Mountain
Observatory, the largest research observatory in
Utah.

"It was a long project that involved lots of
different observers, some of them around the world,"
said Professor Michael Joner, co-author of the
study. "Using measurements that were done at BYU, we
were able to determine that the mass of the central
black hole for this galaxy was about 8 million times
the mass of the sun - that's a really really massive
object."

Astronomers are used to measuring light
radiated by different type of objects, and black
holes are very difficult to measure because they
don't give off any radiant energy. For this reason,
Joner and masters student Carla Carroll, who is also
a co-author of the study, used a method known as
reverberation mapping.

Reverberation mapping involves observing the
light that is emitted as material spirals toward the
black hole. At different distances from the center,
the light interacts with nearby gases, which then
re-emit that light.

These groups of light reach the ground-based
telescope within a few days of each other. By
analyzing this time difference and by measuring how
fast the material is moving around the center of the
galaxy, they were able to determine the mass of this
central black hole.

According to Carroll, current techniques for
this method require some of the largest, and quite
overbooked, telescopes in the world. She and Joner
are working on a way to use smaller telescopes that
have the abilities to observe different active
galaxies. This way, astrophysicists everywhere can
have the ability to do this science using smaller
and less costly telescopes.

"After lots of collaboration, we were both
learning amazing things and coming up with new ideas
and possibilities," Carroll said. "The best part of
this project for me was learning about active
galactic nuclei and supermassive black holes on a
level I never could have in either undergraduate or
graduate classroom settings."

Carroll is finishing up a similar project to
the publication and will graduate in April 2015 with
a Master of Science. She recently earned admission
to the University of Heidelberg in Germany for a
Ph.D. program in astrophysics.

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 08, 2015 - The central regions
of many glittering galaxies, our own Milky Way
included, harbor cores of impenetrable darkness -
black holes with masses equivalent to millions, or
even billions, of suns. What's more, these
supermassive black holes and their host galaxies
appear to develop together, or "co-evolve."

Theory predicts that as galaxies collide and
merge, growing ever more massive, so too do their
dark hearts.

Black holes by themselves are impossible to
see, but their gravity can pull in surrounding gas
to form a swirling band of glowing material called
an accretion disk. When this process happens to a
supermassive black hole, the result is a "quasar" -
an extremely luminous object that outshines all of
the stars in its host galaxy, visible from across
the universe.

"Quasars are valuable probes of the evolution
of galaxies and their central black holes," said S.
George Djorgovski, professor of astronomy at the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"If we can systematically study a large
population of quasars, we can discover rare and
unusual phenomena that can help us better understand
the overall picture of their evolution."

In the journal Nature, Djorgovski and his
collaborators, including Daniel Stern of NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California,
report on an unusual repeating light signal from a
distant quasar that they say is most likely the
result of two supermassive black holes in the final
stages of a merger - something that is predicted
from theory but which has never been observed
before.

The findings could lead to a better
understanding of black hole mergers and galaxy
evolution, and also help shed light on a
long-standing conundrum in astrophysics called the
"final parsec problem." That refers to the failure
of theoretical models to predict what the final
stages of a black hole merger look like, or even how
long the process might take.

"Until now, the only known examples of
supermassive black holes on their way to a merger
have been separated by tens or hundreds of thousands
of light-years," said Stern.

"At such vast distances it would take many
millions, or even billions, of years for a collision
and merger to occur. In contrast, these black holes
are at most a few hundredths of a light-year apart,
and could merge in about a million years or less."

Paris (UPI) Jan 7, 2015 - The guardians of time have
spoken, and this year June 30 will be one second
longer. A so-called leap second will be added to the
world's clock at the end of June.

The decision to plug in an additional second
at the beginning of summer was announced this week
by the Paris-based International Earth Rotation and
Reference Systems Service (IERS), the organization
tasked with maintaining global time.

News of the additional second was delivered
via a memo addressed: "To authorities responsible
for the measurement and distribution of time."

The reason for the extra second: the planet's
rotation is slowing. The planet's clocks have had an
extra second inserted, either at the end of December
or June, 25 times since the practice first began in
1972. This year's leap second will be the 26th.

"They add an extra second to something called
UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) in order to make
sure the rate of UTC is the same as atomic time,"
Nick Stamatakos, the chief of Earth Orientation
Parameters at the U.S. Naval Observatory, told The
Telegraph.

That could be a problem for the long list of
Internet-based companies, programs and services that
modern society has come to rely on so heavily. In
2012, the last time a leap second was added, the
inserted second threw off a variety of systems
synched with UTC clocks. Mozilla, Reddit,
Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon all
crashed as a result of 2012's leap second.

Google was one of the few who avoided the
glitch, having built in a preparedness technology
called Leap Smear, which inserted milliseconds in
their systems' clocks in anticipation of the
full-second leap. It's expected more companies will
employ similar measures as this year's leap second
approaches.

Bristol, UK (SPX) Jan 07, 2015 - A team of engineers
has developed a new acousto-optic device that can
shape and steer beams of light at speeds never
before achieved. The new technology will enable
better optical devices to be made, such as
holographs that can move rapidly in real time.

The research led by Bruce Drinkwater,
Professor of Ultrasonics at the University of
Bristol and Dr Mike MacDonald at the University of
Dundee is published in the journal, Optics Express.

The array consists of 64 tiny piezo-electric
elements which act as high frequency loudspeakers.
The complex sound field generated deflects and
sculpts any light passing through the new device. As
the sound field changes, so does the shape of the
light beam.

Professor Drinkwater from the Department of
Mechanical Engineering said: "This reconfigurability
can happen extremely fast, limited only by the speed
of the sound waves. The key advantage of this method
is that it potentially offers very high refresh
rates - millions of refreshes per second is now
possible. This means that in the future laser
beam-based devices will be able to be reconfigured
much faster than is currently possible. Previously,
the fastest achieved is a few thousand refreshes per
second."

The advancement will enable reconfigurable
lenses that can automatically compensate for
aberrations allowing for improved microscopy and a
new generation of optical tweezers that will make
them more rapidly reconfigurable and so allow better
shaped traps to be produced.

Dr Mike MacDonald, Head of the Biophotonics
research group at the University of Dundee,
explained: "What we have shown can be thought of as
a form of optical holography where the hologram can
be made in real time using sound. Previous attempts
to do this have not had the level of sophistication
that we have achieved in the control of our acoustic
fields, which has given us much greater flexibility
in the control we have over light with these
devices.

"The device can potentially be addressed much
more quickly than existing holographic devices, such
as spatial light modulators, and will also allow for
much higher laser powers to be used. This opens up
applications such as beam shaping in laser
processing of materials, or even fast and high power
control of light beams for free space optical
communications using orbital angular momentum to
increase signal bandwidth, as shown recently by a
demonstration in Vienna."

Professor Drinkwater added: "The number of
applications of this new technology is vast. Optical
devices are everywhere and are used for displays,
communications as well as scientific instruments."

The capabilities of laser beam shaping and
steering are crucial for many optical applications,
such as optical manipulation and aberration
correction in microscopy. Depending on specific
requirements of each application, these capabilities
are currently achieved using different methods which
are based on establishing a certain level of control
over the phase of the laser beam.

Deformable mirrors are used for aberration
corrections in astronomy and spatial light
modulators (SLMs) are the common choice in a wide
range of applications such as holography, optical
tweezers and microscopy.

Amherst MA (SPX) Jan 07, 2015 - Last September,
after years of watching, a team of scientists led by
Amherst College astronomy professor Daryl Haggard
observed and recorded the largest-ever flare in
X-rays from a supermassive black hole at the center
of the Milky Way. The astronomical event, which was
detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, puts
the scientific community one step closer to
understanding the nature and behavior of
supermassive black holes.

Haggard and her colleagues discussed the flare
today at a press conference during this year's
meeting of the American Astronomical Society in
Seattle.

Supermassive black holes are the largest of
black holes, and all large galaxies have one. The
one at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is
called Sagittarius A* (or, Sgr A*, as it is called),
and scientists estimate that it contains about four
and a half million times the mass of our Sun.

Scientists working with Chandra have observed
Sgr A* repeatedly since the telescope was launched
into space in 1999. Haggard and fellow astronomers
were originally using Chandra to see if Sgr A* would
consume parts of a cloud of gas, known as G2.

"Unfortunately, the G2 gas cloud didn't
produce the fireworks we were hoping for when it got
close to Sgr A*," she said. "However, nature often
surprises us and we saw something else that was
really exciting."

Haggard and her team detected an X-ray
outburst last September that was 400 times brighter
than the usual X-ray output from Sgr A*. This
"megaflare" was nearly three times brighter than the
previous record holder that was seen in early 2012.
A second enormous X-ray flare, 200 times brighter
than Sgr A* in its quiet state, was observed with
Chandra on October 20, 2014.

Haggard and her team have two main ideas about
what could be causing Sgr A* to erupt in this
extreme way. One hypothesis is that the gravity of
the supermassive black hole has torn apart a couple
of asteroids that wandered too close. The debris
from such a "tidal disruption" would become very hot
and produce X-rays before disappearing forever
across the black hole's point of no return (called
the "event horizon").

"If an asteroid was torn apart, it would go
around the black hole for a couple of hours - like
water circling an open drain - before falling in,"
said colleague and co-principal investigator Fred
Baganoff of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Cambridge, MA. "That's just how long
we saw the brightest X-ray flare last, so that is an
intriguing clue for us to consider."

If that theory holds up, it means astronomers
have found evidence for the largest asteroid ever to
be torn apart by the Milky Way's black hole.

Another, different idea is that the magnetic
field lines within the material flowing towards Sgr
A* are packed incredibly tightly. If this were the
case, these field lines would occasionally
interconnect and reconfigure themselves. When this
happens, their magnetic energy is converted into the
energy of motion, heat and the acceleration of
particles - which could produce a bright X-ray
flare. Such magnetic flares are seen on the Sun, and
the Sgr A* flares have a similar pattern of
brightness levels to the solar events.

"At the moment, we can't distinguish between
these two very different ideas," said Haggard. "It's
exciting to identify tensions between models and to
have a chance to resolve them with present and
future observations."

In addition to the giant flares, Haggard and
her team also collected more data on a magnetar - a
neutron star with a strong magnetic field - located
close to Sgr A*. This magnetar is undergoing a long
X-ray outburst, and the Chandra data are allowing
astronomers to better understand this unusual
object.

As for the G2: Astronomers estimate that the
gas cloud made its closest approach - still about 15
billion miles away from the edge of the black hole -
in the spring of 2014. The researchers estimate the
record breaking X-ray flares were produced about a
hundred times closer to the black hole, making it
very unlikely that the Chandra flares were
associated with G2.

Boston MA (SPX) Jan 06, 2015 - Astronomers have
observed the largest X-ray flare ever detected from
the supermassive black hole at the center of the
Milky Way galaxy. This event, detected by NASA's
Chandra X-ray Observatory, raises questions about
the behavior of this giant black hole and its
surrounding environment.

The supermassive black hole at the center of
our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, is
estimated to contain about 4.5 million times the
mass of our Sun.

Astronomers made the unexpected discovery
while using Chandra to observe how Sgr A* would
react to a nearby cloud of gas known as G2.

"Unfortunately, the G2 gas cloud didn't
produce the fireworks we were hoping for when it got
close to Sgr A*," said lead researcher Daryl Haggard
of Amherst College in Massachusetts. "However,
nature often surprises us and we saw something else
that was really exciting."

On Sept. 14, 2013, Haggard and her team
detected an X-ray flare from Sgr A* 400 times
brighter than its usual, quiet state. This
"megaflare" was nearly three times brighter than the
previous brightest X-ray flare from Sgr A* in early
2012. After Sgr A* settled down, Chandra observed
another enormous X-ray flare 200 times brighter than
usual on Oct. 20, 2014.

Astronomers estimate that G2 was closest to
the black hole in the spring of 2014, 15 billion
miles away. The Chandra flare observed in September
2013 was about a hundred times closer to the black
hole, making the event unlikely related to G2.

The researchers have two main theories about
what caused Sgr A* to erupt in this extreme way. The
first is that an asteroid came too close to the
supermassive black hole and was torn apart by
gravity. The debris from such a tidal disruption
became very hot and produced X-rays before
disappearing forever across the black hole's point
of no return, or event horizon.

"If an asteroid was torn apart, it would go
around the black hole for a couple of hours - like
water circling an open drain - before falling in,"
said co-author Fred Baganoff of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"That's just how long we saw the brightest X-ray
flare last, so that is an intriguing clue for us to
consider."

If this theory holds up, it means astronomers
may have found evidence for the largest asteroid to
produce an observed X-ray flare after being torn
apart by Sgr A*.

A second theory is that the magnetic field
lines within the gas flowing towards Sgr A* could be
tightly packed and become tangled. These field lines
may occasionally reconfigure themselves and produce
a bright outburst of X-rays. These types of magnetic
flares are seen on the Sun, and the Sgr A* flares
have similar patterns of intensity.

"The bottom line is the jury is still out on
what's causing these giant flares from Sgr A*," said
co-author Gabriele Ponti of the Max Planck Institute
for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. "Such rare
and extreme events give us a unique chance to use a
mere trickle of infalling matter to understand the
physics of one of the most bizarre objects in our
galaxy."

In addition to the giant flares, the G2
observing campaign with Chandra also collected more
data on a magnetar: a neutron star with a strong
magnetic field, located close to Sgr A*. This
magnetar is undergoing a long X-ray outburst, and
the Chandra data are allowing astronomers to better
understand this unusual object.

These results were presented
at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical
Society being held in Seattle.

Washington DC (SPX) Jan 06, 2015 - A team of
researchers at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil
has developed a new levitation device that can hover
a tiny object with more control than any instrument
that has come before.

Featured on this week's cover of the journal
Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, the
device can levitate polystyrene particles by
reflecting sound waves from a source above off a
concave reflector below. Changing the orientation of
the reflector allow the hovering particle to be
moved around.

Other researchers have built similar devices
in the past, but they always required a precise
setup where the sound source and reflector were at
fixed "resonant" distances.

This made controlling the levitating objects
difficult. The new device shows that it is possible
to build a "non-resonant" levitation device -- one
that does not require a fixed separation distance
between the source and the reflector.

This breakthrough may be an important step
toward building larger devices that could be used to
handle hazardous materials, chemically-sensitive
materials like pharmaceuticals -- or to provide
technology for a new generation of high-tech,
gee-whiz children's toys.

"Modern factories have hundreds of robots to
move parts from one place to another," said Marco
Aurelio Brizzotti Andrade, who led the research.
"Why not try to do the same without touching the
parts to be transported?"

The device Andrade and his colleagues devised
was only able to levitate light particles (they
tested it polystyrene blobs about 3 mm across). "The
next step is to improve the device to levitate
heavier materials," he said.

How the Acoustic Levitation Device Works
In recent years, there has been significant progress
in the manipulation of small particles by acoustic
levitation methods, Andrade said.

In a typical setup, an upper cylinder will
emit high-frequency sound waves that, when they hit
the bottom, concave part of the device, are
reflected back. The reflected waves interact with
newly emitted waves, producing what are known as
standing waves, which have minimum acoustic pressure
points (or nodes), and if the acoustical pressure at
these nodes is strong enough, it can counteract the
force of gravity and allow an object to float.

The first successful acoustical levitators
could successfully trap small particles in a fixed
position, but new advances in the past year or so
have allowed researchers not only to trap but also
to transport particles through short distances in
space.

These were sorely won victories, however. In
every levitation device made to date, the distance
between the sound emitter and the reflector had to
be carefully calibrated to achieve resonance before
any levitation could occur. This meant that the
separation distance had to be equal to a multiple of
the half-wavelength of the sound waves. If this
separation distance were changed even slightly, the
standing wave pattern would be destroyed and the
levitation would be lost.

The new levitation device does not require
such a precise separation before operation. In fact,
the distance between the sound emitter and the
reflector can be continually changed in mid-flight
without affecting the levitation performance at all,
Andrade said.

Paris (ESA) Dec 20, 2014 - First impressions can be
deceptive - astronomers have used ESA's X-ray
satellite XMM-Newton to find a massive black hole
hungrily feeding within a tiny dwarf galaxy, despite
there being no hint of this black hole from optical
observations.

The galaxy, an irregular dwarf named
J1329+3234, is one of the smallest galaxies yet to
contain evidence of a massive black hole. Located
over 200 million light-years away, the galaxy is
similar in size to the Small Magellanic Cloud, one
of our nearest neighbouring galaxies, and contains a
few hundred million stars.

In 2013, an international team of astronomers
was intrigued to discover infrared signatures of an
accreting black hole within J1329+3234 when they
studied it with the Wide-Field Infrared Survey
Explorer (WISE).

The same team has now investigated the galaxy
further, using ESA's XMM-Newton to hunt for this
black hole in X-rays - and found something very
surprising.

"The X-ray emission from J1329+3234 is over
100 times stronger than expected for this galaxy,"
says Nathan Secrest of George Mason University in
Virginia, USA, lead author of the new study
published in The Astrophysical Journal. "We would
typically expect to find low-level X-ray emission
from stellar-mass black holes within the galaxy, but
what we found instead was emission consistent with a
very massive black hole."

The combined X-ray and infrared properties of
this galaxy can only be explained by the presence of
a massive black hole residing in J1329+3234, similar
to the supermassive black holes found at the centres
of much more massive galaxies.

While the exact mass of the black hole is not
known, it must be at least 3000 times as massive as
the Sun, although it is likely to be much more
massive than that. If the black hole in J1329+3234
is similar to known low-mass supermassive black
holes, then it has a mass of around 150 000 times
that of the Sun.

A feeding black hole at the centre of a galaxy
is known as an active galactic nucleus, or AGN. In
the region surrounding the black hole, material from
the galaxy emits intensely bright radiation as it
swirls inwards towards the centre of the galaxy and
is devoured by the black hole. AGNs powered by
massive black holes are commonplace in large
galaxies, but they appear to be rarer in galaxies
without a central "bulge" of stars - dwarf galaxies
being a key example.

"This is a really important discovery," says
co-author Shobita Satyapal, also from George Mason
University. "It's interesting enough that such a
tiny galaxy has such a large black hole, but this
also raises questions about how these black holes
form in the first place."

Astronomers believe that the "seeds" of
massive black holes formed very early on in the
Universe, along with the first generation of stars.
These seed black holes then grew into massive black
holes via a string of galaxy mergers. As the
galaxies merged, so did their central black holes.

The turbulent merging process would feed the
accreting black holes with copious amounts of
material while simultaneously building up large,
bulge-dominated galaxies. However, with each
successive merger information about the properties
of the original black hole is lost, meaning that
astronomers cannot determine the mass of the
original seeds by looking at massive bulge-dominated
galaxies - instead they probe their dwarf and
bulgeless relatives, such as J1329+3234, for clues.

Finding a massive black hole within such a
tiny bulgeless galaxy provides support for the
theory that black holes may have grown very
efficiently within the gaseous haloes of forming
galaxies, originating in massive, collapsing clouds
of primordial gas.

Along with J1329+3234, Secrest and his
colleagues found several hundred other bulgeless
galaxies from the WISE survey that also show
intriguing infrared properties - many of which, like
J1329+3234, display no evidence for AGNs in optical
light.

"The idea that we could find an accreting
black hole even in a galaxy with no optical evidence
for one is exciting," notes Secrest. "Massive black
holes and AGNs may be much more common within low
mass and bulgeless galaxies than we currently
think."

In recent years, growing numbers of massive
black holes have been identified within dwarf and
bulgeless galaxies. However, it is much harder to
find them than it is to find their supermassive
counterparts - they are less likely to show up in
optical studies since they are often obscured by
dust and are usually much dimmer, making them
difficult to detect above surrounding light.

This emphasises the importance of
multi-wavelength sky surveys, says ESA's XMM-Newton
project scientist Norbert Schartel. "Using a mix of
optical, infrared, and X-ray observations was vital
here," he adds. "The sensitivity of XMM-Newton made
it possible not only to discover this black hole but
to also fully characterise its spectrum, meaning we
can say with much more certainty that it's a
black-hole-fuelled AGN."

Now astronomers using the Atacama Large
Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have
discovered that black holes don't have to be nearly
so powerful to shut down star formation. By
observing the dust and gas at the center of NGC
1266, a nearby lenticular galaxy with a relatively
modest central black hole, the astronomers have
detected a "perfect storm" of turbulence that is
squelching star formation in a region that would
otherwise be an ideal star factory.

This turbulence is stirred up by jets from the
galaxy's central black hole slamming into an
incredibly dense envelope of gas. This dense region,
which may be the result of a recent merger with
another smaller galaxy, blocks nearly 98 percent of
material propelled by the jets from escaping the
galactic center.

"Like an unstoppable force meeting an
immovable object, the particles in these jets meet
so much resistance when they hit the surrounding
dense gas that they are almost completely stopped in
their tracks," said Katherine Alatalo, an astronomer
with the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at
the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena
and lead author on a paper published in the
Astrophysical Journal.

This energetic collision produces powerful
turbulence in the surrounding gas, disrupting the
first critical stage of star formation.

"So what we see is the most intense
suppression of star formation ever observed," noted
Alatalo.

Previous observations of NGC 1266 revealed a
broad outflow of gas from the galactic center
traveling up to 400 kilometers per second. Alatalo
and her colleagues estimate that this outflow is as
forceful as the simultaneous supernova explosion of
10,000 stars. The jets, though powerful enough to
stir the gas, are not powerful enough to give it the
velocity it needs to escape from the system.

"Another way of looking at it is that the jets
are injecting turbulence into the gas, preventing it
from settling down, collapsing, and forming stars,"
said National Radio Astronomy Observatory astronomer
and co-author Mark Lacy.

The region observed by ALMA contains about 400
million times the mass of our Sun in star-forming
gas, which is 100 times more than is found in giant
star-forming molecular clouds in our own Milky Way.
Normally, gas this concentrated should be producing
stars at a rate at least 50 times faster than the
astronomers observe in this galaxy.

Previously, astronomers believed that only
extremely powerful quasars and radio galaxies
contained black holes that were powerful enough to
serve as a star-forming "on/off" switch.

"The usual assumption in the past has been
that the jets needed to be powerful enough to eject
the gas from the galaxy completely in order to be
effective at stopping start formation," said Lacy.

To make this discovery, the astronomers first
pinpointed the location of the far-infrared light
being emitted by the galaxy. Normally, this light is
associated with star formation and enables
astronomers to detect regions where new stars are
forming.

In the case of NGC 1266, however, this light
was coming from an extremely confined region at the
center of the galaxy. "This very small area was
almost too small for the infrared light to be coming
from star formation," noted Alatalo.

With ALMA's exquisite sensitivity and
resolution, and along with observations from CARMA
(the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave
Astronomy), the astronomers were then able to trace
the location of the very dense molecular gas at the
galactic center. They found that the gas is
surrounding this compact source of far-infrared
light.

Under normal conditions, gas this dense would
be forming stars at a very high rate. The dust
embedded within this gas would then be heated by
young stars and seen as a bright and extended source
of infrared light. The small size and faintness of
the infrared source in this galaxy suggests that NGC
1266 is instead choking on its own fuel, seemingly
in defiance of the rules of star formation.

The astronomers also speculate that there is a
feedback mechanism at work in this region.
Eventually, the black hole will calm down and the
turbulence will subside so star formation can begin
anew. With this renewed star formation, however,
comes greater motion in the dense gas, which then
falls in on the black hole and reestablishes the
jets, shutting down star formation once again.

NGC 1266 is located approximately 100 million
light-years away in the constellation Eridanus.
Leticular galaxies are spiral galaxies, like our own
Milky Way, but they have little interstellar gas
available to form new stars.

Washington DC (SPX) Dec 16, 2014 - Credit card fraud
and identify theft are serious problems for
consumers and industries. Though corporations and
individuals work to improve safeguards, it has
become increasingly difficult to protect financial
data and personal information from criminal
activity. Fortunately, new insights into quantum
physics may soon offer a solution.

As reported in The Optical Society's (OSA) new
high-impact journal Optica, a team of researchers
from the Netherlands has harnessed the power of
quantum mechanics to create a fraud-proof method for
authenticating a physical "key" that is virtually
impossible to thwart.

This innovative security measure, known as
Quantum-Secure Authentication, can confirm the
identity of any person or object, including debit
and credit cards, even if essential information
(like the complete structure of the card) has been
stolen. It uses the unique quantum properties of
light to create a secure question-and-answer (Q&A)
exchange that cannot be "spoofed" or copied.

The "Question-and-Answer" Security Game
Traditional magnetic-stripe-only cards are
relatively simple to use but also simple to copy.
Recently, banks have begun issuing so-called "smart
cards" that include a microprocessor chip to
authenticate, identify and enhance security. But
regardless of how complex the code or how many
layers of security, the problem remains that an
attacker who obtains the information stored inside
the card can copy or emulate it.

The new approach outlined in this paper avoids
this risk entirely by using the peculiar quantum
properties of photons that allow them to be in
multiple locations at the same time to convey the
authentication questions and answers. Though
difficult to reconcile with our everyday
experiences, this strange property of light can
create a fraud-proof Q&A exchange, like those used
to authorize credit card transactions.

"Single photons of light have very special
properties that seem to defy normal behavior," said
Pepijn Pinkse, a researcher from the University of
Twente and lead author on the paper. "When properly
harnessed, they can encode information in such a way
that prevents attackers from determining what the
information is."

The process works by transmitting a small,
specific number of photons onto a specially prepared
surface on a credit card and then observing the
tell-tale pattern they make. Since -- in the quantum
world -- a single photon can exist in multiple
locations, it becomes possible to create a complex
pattern with a few photons, or even just one.

Due to the quantum properties of light, any
attempt by a hacker to observe the Q&A exchange
would, as physicists say, collapse the quantum
nature of the light and destroy the information
being transmitted. This makes Quantum-Secure
Authentication unbreakable regardless of any future
developments in technology.

Making Cards Quantum Secure
To provide security in the real world, a credit card
-- for example -- would be equipped with a
paper-thin section of white paint containing
millions of nanoparticles. Using a laser, individual
photons of light are projected into the paint where
they bounce around the nanoparticles like metal
balls in a pinball machine until they escape back to
the surface, creating the pattern used to
authenticate the card.

If "normal" light is projected onto the area,
an attacker could measure the entering pattern and
return the correct response pattern. A bank would
therefore not be able to see a difference between
the real card and the counterfeit signal projected
by the attacker.

However, if a bank sends a pattern of single
"quantum" photons into the paint, the reflected
pattern would appear to have more information - or
points of light - than the number of photons
projected. An attacker attempting to intercept the
"question" would destroy the quantum properties of
the light and capture only a fraction of the
information needed to authenticate the transaction.

"It would be like dropping 10 bowling balls
onto the ground and creating 200 separate impacts,"
said Pinkse. "It's impossible to know precisely what
information was sent (what pattern was created on
the floor) just by collecting the 10 bowling balls.
If you tried to observe them falling, it would
disrupt the entire system."

Quantum, But Not Difficult
According to Pinkse, this unique way of providing
security is suitable for protecting government
buildings, bank cards, credit cards, identification
cards, and even cars. "The best thing about our
method is that secrets aren't necessary. So they
can't be filched either," he said.

Quantum-Secure Authentication could be
employed in numerous situations relatively easily,
since it uses simple and cheap technology -- such as
lasers and projectors -- that is already available.

San Diego CA (SPX) Dec 16, 2014 - An anomaly spotted
at the Large Hadron Collider has prompted scientists
to reconsider a mathematical description of the
underlying physics. By considering two forces that
are distinct in everyday life but unified under
extreme conditions like those within the collider
and just after the birth of the universe, they have
simplified one description of the interactions of
elementary particles.

Their new version makes specific predictions
about events that future experiments at the LHC and
other colliders should observe and could help to
reveal "new physics," particles or processes that
have yet to be discovered.

Composite subatomic structures created by
powerful collisions of protons have fallen apart in
unexpected ways within a detector in the Large
Hadron Collider called LHCb.

The 'b' in the detector's name stands for
beauty, a designation for a kind of quark, one of
the fundamental building blocks of matter. Pairs of
quarks, a beauty quark plus another - any one of
several different kinds - together make up a beauty
meson.

Mesons are unstable, fleeting structures that
quickly decay into elementary particles. One type of
decay produces either an electron and a positron, or
a muon and its anti-matter counterpart, an
anti-muon.

The Standard Model of particle physics, a
powerful mathematical model that has guided
physicists to the discovery of the Higgs boson and
other particles before it, predicts that the two
outcomes will occur at equal rates.

But experiments using the LHCb detector see a
skewed muon-to-electron decay ratio lower than
expected by 25 percent. Anomalies of this kind point
to "new physics," details of the fundamental forces
of nature that remain to be worked out.

Benjamin Grinstein, professor of physics at
the University of California, San Diego, with
postdoctoral fellows Rodrigo Alonso De Pablo and
Jorge Martin Camalich reconsidered the mathematics
that underlie the prediction. They published a
revision this week in the journal Physical Review
Letters.

The Standard Model describes the particles and
their interactions, which create the fundamental
forces of nature including electromagnetism and the
"weak force," which is responsible for radioactive
decay.

In ordinary circumstances, the weak force and
electromagnetism appear to be distinct, but under
extraordinary conditions, such as the high energies
produced by colliders or extreme condition of the
cosmos moments after the Big Bang, they are thought
to be unified, a notion called the electroweak
theory.

"We noticed that the parameters people were
using for experiments for low-mass particles like
mesons were not incorporating constraints consistent
with this extension -- these modifications to the
Standard Model that account for additional
interactions," Grinstein said. "When you do, you
find surprisingly many restrictions. The thought was
that at low energies you can forget about
constraints from electroweak theory because you
don't see them, but that's not true."

When the two forces are considered as one,
some of the mathematical terms that describe the
interactions, called parameters, are not allowed and
can be discarded, Grinstein's group concluded.
Others are related, and so can be collapsed into
single parameters, greatly reducing the total number
of parameters the model must consider.

"Usually a closer look leads to more detailed
or complicated models. One of the nicest things
about this project is that our assumptions
remarkably simplified the study of the physics of
these decays," Alonso said.

"We were able to pin down the new physics to
explain the anomaly," Camalich said.

Their description is entirely consistent with
the mathematics of the Standard Model. It is an
add-on that accounts for small deviations in the
expected behavior of low mass particles, such as the
way beauty, strange and charm mesons decay.

Their simplified mathematical description
makes specific predictions about what experimental
physicists should observe. It constrains the spin,
or helicity, of the elementary particles produced by
certain interactions, for example.

These are extremely rare events; just one in
100 million beauty mesons decay in this way, though
the collider produces billions. Only this one
detector has seen the anomaly Grinstein's group
considered.

Quantum field theory says that forces, or
interactions, arise from the exchange of particles.

"This parametrization ignores the particle
exchange. It's agnostic about that," Grinstein said.
But it's a potential guide for discovering new
elementary particles. "Once the exchange is well
described, you can go back to ask what kind of
particle must mediate it with some very specific
requirements."

If additional particles exist, they have
escaped notice thus far, perhaps because they are so
massive that colliders haven't yet reached the
energies needed to produce them.

Cosmology points to undiscovered physics as
well with the existence of dark matter made of a
substance unknown and dark energy accelerating the
expansion of the universe with an unaccounted for
force. Mysteries could convene if new particles turn
out to be the stuff of dark matter.

"In physics, if you keep asking questions you
get to the fundamentals, the basic interactions that
can explain everything else," Alonso said.

La Chaux-De-Fonds, Switzerland (AFP) Dec 16, 2014 -
Barely a few months after dismissing Apple's
smartwatch, the new chief executive of luxury Swiss
watchmaker Tag Heuer conceded Tuesday that such a
hi-tech gadget might after all have a place in his
firm's line-up.

"Initially, we were all a bit reticent,"
Jean-Claude Biver told reporters in La
Chaux-de-Fonds, the Swiss city at the centre of the
watchmaking industry.

But he insisted that any new technology would
not dilute the company's reputation for making
luxury goods that last.

"We will only make smartwatches if we are the
best, different and unique," he said.

Biver, an industry legend who leads the watch
division of Tag Heuer's owners LVMH, was appointed
to head the Swiss brand on an interim basis last
week following the departure of Stephane Linder.

He refused to divulge what Tag Heuer was
planning, but said it would divide its research and
development department so that one side could focus
on technological innovation.

Any smartwatch would have to be developed
through a partnership, perhaps with a university or
a specialist firm.

Company vice-president Guy Semon would not be
drawn on whether such a project might include a deal
with a big US technology groups such as Google or
Intel.

"We're casting a wide net and looking at very
big companies," said Semon, who was formerly head of
Tag Heuer's research and development.

He added that he viewed smartwatches as a
bigger challenge than the introduction of quartz
watches in the 1970s, a development which plunged
Swiss watchmaking into a major crisis.

Tag Heuer is already undergoing changes. In
September, the company laid off 46 Swiss employees
and another 49 had their contracts suspended because
of sluggish sales.

The firm said it wanted to concentrate on its
core business, scrapping products such as telephones
and accessories, although maintaining its line of
sunglasses.

When the Apple Watch was unveiled in
September, Biver insisted it would have no impact on
the high end of the watch industry.

"Luxury is eternal, it is perennial. It is not
something that becomes worthless after five years,"
he had said.

Singapore (SPX) Dec 24, 2014 - Here's a nice
surprise: quantum physics is less complicated than
we thought. An international team of researchers has
proved that two peculiar features of the quantum
world previously considered distinct are different
manifestations of the same thing. The result is
published in Nature Communications.

Patrick Coles, Jedrzej Kaniewski, and
Stephanie Wehner made the breakthrough while at the
Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National
University of Singapore. They found that
'wave-particle duality' is simply the quantum
'uncertainty principle' in disguise, reducing two
mysteries to one.

"The connection between uncertainty and
wave-particle duality comes out very naturally when
you consider them as questions about what
information you can gain about a system. Our result
highlights the power of thinking about physics from
the perspective of information," says Wehner, who is
now an Associate Professor at QuTech at the Delft
University of Technology in the Netherlands.

The discovery deepens our understanding of
quantum physics and could prompt ideas for new
applications of wave-particle duality.

Wave-particle duality is the idea that a
quantum object can behave like a wave, but that the
wave behaviour disappears if you try to locate the
object. It's most simply seen in a double slit
experiment, where single particles, electrons, say,
are fired one by one at a screen containing two
narrow slits.

The particles pile up behind the slits not in
two heaps as classical objects would, but in a
stripy pattern like you'd expect for waves
interfering. At least this is what happens until you
sneak a look at which slit a particle goes through -
do that and the interference pattern vanishes.

The quantum uncertainty principle is the idea
that it's impossible to know certain pairs of things
about a quantum particle at once. For example, the
more precisely you know the position of an atom, the
less precisely you can know the speed with which
it's moving.

It's a limit on the fundamental knowability of
nature, not a statement on measurement skill. The
new work shows that how much you can learn about the
wave versus the particle behaviour of a system is
constrained in exactly the same way.

Wave-particle duality and uncertainty have
been fundamental concepts in quantum physics since
the early 1900s. "We were guided by a gut feeling,
and only a gut feeling, that there should be a
connection," says Coles, who is now a Postdoctoral
Fellow at the Institute for Quantum Computing in
Waterloo, Canada.

It's possible to write equations that capture
how much can be learned about pairs of properties
that are affected by the uncertainty principle.
Coles, Kaniewski and Wehner are experts in a form of
such equations known as 'entropic uncertainty
relations', and they discovered that all the maths
previously used to describe wave-particle duality
could be reformulated in terms of these relations.

"It was like we had discovered the 'Rosetta
Stone' that connected two different languages," says
Coles. "The literature on wave-particle duality was
like hieroglyphics that we could now translate into
our native tongue. We had several eureka moments
when we finally understood what people had done," he
says.

Because the entropic uncertainty relations
used in their translation have also been used in
proving the security of quantum cryptography -
schemes for secure communication using quantum
particles - the researchers suggest the work could
help inspire new cryptography protocols.

In earlier papers, Wehner and collaborators
found connections between the uncertainty principle
and other physics, namely quantum 'non-locality' and
the second law of thermodynamics. The tantalising
next goal for the researchers is to think about how
these pieces fit together and what bigger picture
that paints of how nature is constructed.

Washington (UPI) Dec 21, 2014 - At 6:04 p.m. EST on
Sunday, the sun will be appear directly overhead
along the Tropic of Capricorn, at 23.5 degrees
latitude, south of the Equator.

It's the winter solstice, marking the
beginning of winter and the longest day of the year
in the Southern Hemisphere and the shortest day of
the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Naturally,
being the shortest day of the year, Sunday night
will be the longest night of the year for the top
half of planet Earth.

More than that, Sunday night will be longest
in over a century. Scientists estimate that the
Earth's rotation has slowed nearly every year since
our planet first formed 4.5 billion years ago. While
many thought that would mean tonight would be the
longest night in history, it is actually only the
longest since 1912, as the Earth has sped back up
slightly in the decades since.

The slowdown is caused by a phenomenon known
as tidal accelerations, whereby Earth's tidal bulge
is pushed ahead by the planet's rotation. The bulge
acts as a boost to the Moon, pushing its orbit
slightly farther away, while the friction of the
offset tidal bulge slows the rotation of the Earth.
The effects are infinitesimal, but extremely precise
atomic clocks have allowed scientists to confirm the
slowdown.

That's the complicated part. As to why every
December 21 or 22 is the shortest day and longest
night of the year in the north and vise versa in the
south -- that's easy. Because the Earth rotates
along a tilted axis, the amount of sunlight
different places on Earth receive over the course of
a day changes as the Earth orbits around the sun.
The roles of the two hemispheres are reversed during
on June 20 or 21 during the summer solstice, when
Northern Hemisphere residents enjoy their longest
day of the year.

While the two solstices mark the longest and
shortest days of the year, they rarely ever mark the
warmest or coldest days or nights. For those north
of the equator, the days will be continue to longer
and longer for the next six months, but because the
ocean is slower to heat up and cool down, it will be
several more weeks before the ground and ocean reach
equilibrium and the top half of the planet can begin
to take advantage of the extra solar energy.

Lausanne, Switzerland (SPX) Dec 26, 2014 - Electrons
may be seen as small magnets that also carry a
negative electrical charge. On a fundamental level,
these two properties are indivisible. However, in
certain materials where the electrons are
constrained in a quasi one-dimensional world, they
appear to split into a magnet and an electrical
charge, which can move freely and independently of
each other.

A longstanding question has been whether or
not similar phenomenon can happen in more than one
dimension. A team lead by EPFL scientists now has
uncovered new evidence showing that this can happen
in quasi two-dimensional magnetic materials. Their
work is published in Nature Physics.

A strange phenomenon occurs with electrons in
materials that are so thin that they can be thought
of as being one-dimensional, e.g. nanowires. Under
certain conditions, the electrons in these materials
can actually split into an electrical charge and a
magnet, which are referred to as "fractional
particles". An important but still unresolved
question in fundamental particle physics is whether
this phenomenon could arise and be observed in more
dimensions, like two- or three-dimensional systems.

Henrik M. Ronnow and Bastien Dalla Piazza at
EPFL and Martin Mourigal (recently appointed
Assistant professor at Georgia Tech) have now led a
study that provides both experimental and
theoretical evidence showing that this exotic split
of the electrons into fractional particles actually
does take place in two dimensions.

The scientists combined state-of-the-art
polarized neutron scattering technology with a novel
theoretical framework, and tested a material that
normally acts as an electrical insulator. Their data
showed that the electrons magnetic moment can split
into two halves and move almost independently in the
material.

The existence of fractional particles in more
than one dimension was proposed by Nobel laureate PW
Anderson in 1987 when trying to develop a theory
that could explain high-temperature
superconductivity: the ability of some materials to
conduct electricity with zero resistance at very
low, yet technologically feasible, temperatures.
This phenomenon remains one of the greatest
mysteries and has been extensively researched in the
most promising high-temperature superconductors, the
copper-containing cuprates.

Under temperatures close to absolute zero,
electrons bind together to form an exotic liquid
that can flow with exactly no friction. While this
was previously observed at near-absolute zero
temperatures in other materials, this electron
liquid can form in cuprates at much higher
temperatures that can be reached using liquid
nitrogen alone.

Consequently, there is currently an effort to
find new materials displaying high-temperature
superconductivity at room temperature. But
understanding how it arises on a fundamental level
has proven challenging, which limits the development
of materials that can be used in applications. The
advances brought by the EPFL scientists now bring
support for the theory of superconductivity as
postulated by Anderson.

"This work marks a new level of understanding
in one of the most fundamental models in physics,"
says Henrik M. Ronnow. "It also lends new support
for Anderson's theory of high-temperature
superconductivity, which, despite twenty-five years
of intense research, remains one of the greatest
mysteries in the discovery of modern materials."

Kent, OH (SPX) Dec 23, 2014 - Unlike in mathematics,
it is rare to have exact solutions to physics
problems. "When they do present themselves, they are
an opportunity to test the approximation schemes
(algorithms) that are used to make progress in
modern physics," said Michael Strickland, Ph.D.,
associate professor of physics at Kent State
University.

Strickland and four of his collaborators
recently published an exact solution in the journal
Physical Review Letters that applies to a wide array
of physics contexts and will help researchers to
better model galactic structure, supernova
explosions and high-energy particle collisions, such
as those studied at the Large Hadron Collider at
CERN in Switzerland.

In these collisions, experimentalists create a
short-lived high-temperature plasma of quarks and
gluons called quark gluon plasma (QGP), much like
what is believed to be the state of the universe
milliseconds after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years
ago.

In their article, Strickland and co-authors
Gabriel S. Denicol of McGill University, Ulrich
Heinz and Mauricio Martinez of the Ohio State
University, and Jorge Noronha of the University of
Sao Paulo presented the first exact solution that
describes a system that is expanding at relativistic
velocities radially and longitudinally.

The equation that was solved was invented by
Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann in 1872 to model
the dynamics of fluids and gases. This equation was
ahead of its time since Boltzmann imagined that
matter was atomic in nature and that the dynamics of
the system could be understood solely by analyzing
collisional processes between sets of particles.

"In the last decade, there has been a lot of
work modeling the evolution of the quark gluon
plasma using hydrodynamics in which the QGP is
imagined to be fluidlike," Strickland said. "As it
turns out, the equations of hydrodynamics can be
obtained from the Boltzmann equation and, unlike the
hydrodynamical equations, the Boltzmann equation is
not limited to the case of a system that is in (or
close to) thermal equilibrium.

"Both types of expansion occur in relativistic
heavy ion collisions, and one must include both if
one hopes to make a realistic description of the
dynamics," Strickland continued. "The new exact
solution has both types of expansion and can be used
to tell us which hydrodynamical framework is the
best."

Heidelberg, Germany (SPX) Dec 19, 2014 - Physicists
are continuously advancing the control they can
exert over matter. A German-Spanish team working
with researchers from the Max Planck Institute for
Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg has now become the
first to image the motion of the two electrons in a
helium atom and even to control this electronic
partner dance. The scientists are succeeding in this
task with the aid of different laser pulses which
they timed very accurately with respect to each
other.

They employed a combination of visible flashes
of light and extreme-ultraviolet pulses which lasted
only a few hundred attoseconds. One attosecond
corresponds to a billionth of a billionth of a
second.

Physicists aim to specifically influence the
motion of electron pairs because they want to
revolutionise chemistry: If lasers can steer the
paired bonding electrons in molecules, they could
possibly produce substances which cannot be produced
using conventional chemical means. Electrons are
hard to get a hold of.

Physicists cannot determine their precise
location in an atom, but they can narrow down the
region where the charge carriers are most probably
located. When electrons move, this brings about a
change to the regions where the electrons have the
highest probability of being located. In some
electronic states - physicists call them
superposition states - this motion manifests itself
as a pulsing with a regular beat.

It is precisely this pulsing motion which
scientists working with Thomas Pfeifer, Director at
the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, have
recorded in a series of images of a helium atom.

They observed how the electron pair danced
close to the atomic nucleus one moment and slightly
moved away from it the next moment. The researchers
were not satisfied with the role of mere observers,
however, and also actively intervened in the
electronic choreography. They laid down the rhythm
of the electronic partner dance, so to speak.

"The motion of individual electrons in the
atom has already been imaged quite often and even
manipulated as well," says Christian Ott, lead
author of the study. "We have now achieved it for a
pair of electrons which were bound together for a
short time."

When electrons are shifted, molecular bonds
can be created
On the one hand, the study of an electron pair is
useful for physicists who want to gain a better
understanding of how atoms and molecules interact
with light as this interaction usually involves two
or more electrons.

It is useful for chemistry, on the other hand,
if they are able to direct pairs of electrons,
because the typical chemical bond consists of just
such a pair; this means that chemists must always
move at least two electrons when they want to create
or break a molecular bond.

In order to choreograph and film electrons in
a helium atom, the Heidelberg-based physicists sent
two laser pulses through a cell with helium gas. It
is not only the energy, i.e. the colour of the
pulses, which is important here, but also their
intensity and the interval between them. The
researchers first move the electrons of the helium
into the ultrafast pulsing state with the aid of an
ultraviolet flash.

They succeed only because the duration of this
pulse is shorter than one femtosecond (one-millionth
part of a billionth of a second), however. This is
how long the pair of electrons needs for one cycle
of the pulsing motion in which the pair is initially
closer to the nucleus, then moves away from it and
then returns to the nucleus again.

The researchers then use a weak, visible laser
pulse to determine where the electrons are dancing
at that particular moment. And by varying the
interval between the ultraviolet attosecond pulse
and the visible one, they produce a movie of the
electronic dance: "Although we do not directly image
where the electrons are," explains Thomas Pfeifer,
"the visible pulse provides us with the relative
phase of the superposition state."

The phase describes the to and fro of an
oscillation, and hence the rhythmic motion of the
electron pair. In this case it tells the physicists
at which point of their natural pas de deux around
the helium atom the electrons are at a given moment.

The team in Heidelberg uses findings from
previous research to determine the dance moves. From
this existing knowledge they determine where the
electrons are when they are not moving.

"With the information on the phase which we
measured here and our prior knowledge we reconstruct
where the electrons are at a given time," says
Pfeifer. He and his colleagues' experimental results
are in good agreement with state-of-the art
theoretical simulations by their cooperators Luca
Argenti and Fernando Martin at Universidad Autonoma
de Madrid in Spain, confirming the validity of the
experimental and computational methodology.

Intense visible laser pulses change the rhythm
of the electronic dance
The Heidelberg-based physicists also rely on these
simulations to confirm the second part of their
experiments. The visible laser pulse here serves
them not only as a camera but also as a pacemaker
for the pulsing motion of the electrons.

For when they increase the intensity of the
pulse, the points in time at which the electrons are
close to the atomic nucleus or further away from it
shift in time. The researchers also record in an
image sequence how the rhythm and thus the
choreography of the electronic dance changes.

Thomas Pfeifer and his colleagues have not yet
been able to explain all the details which they
observe in the experiments with intense laser
pulses. They want to change this now with more
comprehensive experiments on the effect of the
pulses.

In future experiments they also want to follow
the subsequent fate of the pair of electrons in
great detail, for the electronic dance in the
superposition state ends with one of the two
partners being ejected from the atom, with the
consequence that the atom is ionised.

These ionisations also play a role in many
chemical reactions. A better understanding of such
wild two-electron dances could thus tell chemists
how a reaction can be steered into the desired
direction and product channels. At this point, at
the latest, attosecond physics would create new
tools for chemistry as well.

London, UK (SPX) Dec 15, 2014 - For the first time
researchers have measured large distances in the
Universe using data, rather than calculations
related to general relativity.

A research team from Imperial College London
and the University of Barcelona has used data from
astronomical surveys to measure a standard distance
that is central to our understanding of the
expansion of the universe.

Previously the size of this 'standard ruler'
has only been predicted from theoretical models that
rely on general relativity to explain gravity at
large scales. The new study is the first to measure
it using observed data. A standard ruler is an
object which consistently has the same physical size
so that a comparison of its actual size to its size
in the sky will provide a measurement of its
distance to earth.

"Our research suggests that current methods
for measuring distance in the Universe are more
complicated than they need to be," said Professor
Alan Heavens from the Department of Physics,
Imperial College London who led the study.
"Traditionally in cosmology, general relativity
plays a central role in most models and
interpretations. We have demonstrated that current
data are powerful enough to measure the geometry and
expansion history of the Universe without relying on
calculations relating to general relativity.

"We hope this more data-driven approach,
combined with an ever increasing wealth of
observational data, could provide more precise
measurements that will be useful for future projects
that are planning to answer major questions around
the acceleration of the Universe and dark energy."

The standard ruler measured in the research is
the baryon acoustic oscillation scale. This is a
pattern of a specific length which is imprinted in
the clustering of matter created by small variations
in density in the very early Universe (about 400,000
years after the Big Bang). The length of this
pattern, which is the same today as it was then, is
the baryon acoustic oscillation scale.

The team calculated the length to be 143
Megaparsecs (nearly 480 million light years) which
is similar to accepted predictions for this distance
from models based on general relativity.

Published in Physical Review Letters, the
findings of the research suggest it is possible to
measure cosmological distances independently from
models that rely on general relativity.

Einstein's theory of general relativity
replaced Newton's law to become the accepted
explanation of how gravity behaves at large scales.
Many important astrophysics models are based on
general relativity, including those dealing with the
expansion of the Universe and black holes. However
some unresolved issues surround general relativity.

These include its lack of reconciliation with
the laws of quantum physics and the need for it to
be extrapolated many orders of magnitude in scales
in order to apply it in cosmological settings. No
other physics law have been extrapolated that much
without needing any adjustment, so its assumptions
are still open to question.

Co-author of the study, Professor Raul Jimenez
from the University of Barcelona said: "The
uncertainties around general relativity have
motivated us to develop methods to derive more
direct measurements of the cosmos, rather than
relying so heavily on inferences from models. For
our study we only made some minimal theoretical
assumptions such as the symmetry of the Universe and
a smooth expansion history."

Co-author Professor Licia Verde from the
University of Barcelona added: "There is a big
difference between measuring distance and inferring
its value indirectly. Usually in cosmology we can
only do the latter and this is one of these rare and
precious cases where we can directly measure
distance.

Most statements in cosmology assume general
relativity works and does so on extremely large
scales, which means we are often extrapolating
figures out of our comfort zone. So it is reassuring
to discover that we can make strong and important
statements without depending on general relativity
and which match previous statements. It gives one
confidence that the observations we have of the
Universe, as strange and puzzling as they might be,
are realistic and sound!"

The research used current data from
astronomical surveys on the brightness of exploding
stars (supernovae) and on the regular pattern in the
clustering of matter (baryonic acoustic
oscillations) to measure the size of this 'standard
ruler'. The matter that created this standard ruler
formed about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. This
period was a time when the physics of the Universe
was still relatively simple so the researchers did
not need to consider more 'exotic' concepts such as
dark energy in their measurements.

"In this study we have used measurements that
are very clean," Professor Heavens explained, "And
the theory that we do apply comes from a time
relatively soon after the Big Bang when the physics
was also clean. This means we have what we believe
to be a precise method of measurement based on
observations of the cosmos.

"Astrophysics is an incredibly active but
changeable field and the support for the different
models is liable to change. Even when models are
abandoned, measurements of the cosmos will survive.
If we can rely on direct measurements based on real
observations rather than theoretical models then
this is good news for cosmology and astrophysics."

Paris (ESA) Dec 15, 2014 - Swiss watchmaker Omega
has announced a new version of its historic space
watch, tested and qualified with ESA's help and
drawing on an invention of ESA astronaut
Jean-Francois Clervoy.

Jean-Francois flew in space three times in the
1990s and began thinking how to improve the
wristwatches he wore on his missions. ESA filed a
patent based on his ideas for a timepiece that helps
astronauts to track their mission events.

One of the new functions allows the wearer to
set a date in the past or future down to the second
and have the watch calculate how much time has
elapsed or is left.

Other features useful for astronauts include
flexible programming of multiple alarms with
different ring tones.

The Omega company, with its strong links to
spaceflight since the first Moon landings in the
1960s, was interested in improving its line of
Speedmaster Professional watches, and called on
ESA's patent for the new Speedmaster Skywalker X-33.

Testing the new watch
The Skywalker has passed rigorous testing at ESA's
technical heart, ESTEC, in Noordwijk, the
Netherlands, where many ESA satellites are put
through their paces before launch.

The timepiece proved itself capable of
surviving anything an astronaut might experience -
and more. First, it displayed ruggedness by
surviving ESTEC's shaker simulating the intense
vibrations of a launch. Then it was spun in a
centrifuge to reach seven times the gravity we feel
on Earth, just like an astronaut might endure when
returning to our planet.

The next step was to analyse its performance
after sitting in a vacuum chamber with temperatures
ranging from -45 C to +75 C, a far greater range
than an astronaut would ever have to endure.

Finally, the watch was blasted with radiation
in Sweden under supervision by France's ONERA/DESP
aerospace centre to simulate space radiation. Each
watch was inspected visually and its functions were
reviewed before and after each test.

Ready for spaceflight
The Skywalker model is upgraded with new software
loaded in an advanced quartz-based timekeeping unit
with a more robust, redesigned case. A dual analogue
and digital display provides quick access to
multiple time references such as time zones or
elapsed time for precise time logging.

President of Omega, Stephen Urquhart, said:
"We are delighted that our friends at the European
Space Agency have tested and qualified the
Speedmaster Skywalker X-33 for all its piloted
missions, which is a natural extension of our long
relationship with NASA and its space programme.

"ESA's abilities and ambitions are
extraordinary, as demonstrated by their recent
high-profile successes with Rosetta and Philae, and
we are proud that their name and endorsement grace
the back of this iconic chronograph."

Berkeley CA (SPX) Dec 15, 2014 - The entire
semiconductor industry, not to mention Silicon
Valley, is built on the propensity of electrons in
silicon to get kicked out of their atomic shells and
become free. These mobile electrons are routed and
switched though transistors, carrying the digital
information that characterizes our age.

An international team of physicists and
chemists based at the University of California,
Berkeley, has for the first time taken snapshots of
this ephemeral event using attosecond pulses of soft
x-ray light lasting only a few billionths of a
billionth of a second.

While earlier femtosecond lasers were unable
to resolve the jump from the valence shell of the
silicon atom across the band-gap into the conduction
electron region, the new experiments now show that
this transition takes less than 450 attoseconds.

"Though this excitation step is too fast for
traditional experiments, our novel technique allowed
us to record individual snapshots that can be
composed into a 'movie' revealing the timing
sequence of the process," explains Stephen Leone, UC
Berkeley professor of chemistry and physics.

Leone, his UC Berkeley colleagues and
collaborators from the Ludwig-Maximilians
Universitat in Munich, Germany, the University of
Tsukuba, Japan, and the Molecular Foundry at the
Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory report their achievement in the Dec. 12
issue of the journal Science.

Century-old discovery observed
Leone notes that more than a century has elapsed
since the discovery that light can make certain
materials conductive. The first movie of this
transition follows the excitation of electrons
across the band-gap in silicon with the help of
attosecond extreme ultraviolet (XUV) spectroscopy,
developed in the Attosecond Physics Laboratory run
by Leone and Daniel Neumark, UC Berkeley professor
of chemistry.

In semiconducting materials, electrons are
initially localized around the individual atoms
forming the crystal and thus cannot move or
contribute to electrical currents. When light hits
these materials or a voltage is applied, some of the
electrons absorb energy and get excited into mobile
states in which the electrons can move through the
material. The localized electrons take a "quantum
jump" into the conduction band, tunneling through
the barrier that normally keeps them bound to atoms.

These mobile electrons make the semiconductor
material conductive so that an applied voltage
results in a flowing current. This behavior allows
engineers to make silicon switches, known as
transistors, which have become the basis of all
digital electronics.

The researchers used attosecond XUV
spectroscopy like an attosecond stop watch to follow
the electron's transition. They exposed a silicon
crystal to ultrashort flashes of visible light
emitted by a laser source. The subsequent
illumination with x-ray-pulses of only a few tens of
attoseconds (10-18 seconds) in duration allowed the
researchers to take snapshots of the evolution of
the excitation process triggered by the laser
pulses.

Unambiguous interpretation of the experimental
data was facilitated by a series of supercomputer
simulations carried out by researchers at the
University of Tsukuba and the Molecular Foundry. The
simulations modeled both the excitation process and
the subsequent interaction of x-ray pulses with the
silicon crystal.

Electron jump makes atoms rebound
The excitation of a semiconductor with light is
traditionally conceived as a process involving two
distinct events. First, the electrons absorb light
and get excited. Afterwards, the lattice, composed
of the individual atoms in the crystal, rearranges
in response to this redistribution of electrons,
turning part of the absorbed energy into heat
carried by vibrational waves called phonons.

In analyzing their data, the team found clear
indications that this hypothesis is true. They
showed that initially, only the electrons react to
the impinging light while the atomic lattice remains
unaffected. Long after the excitation laser pulse
has left the sample - some 60 femtoseconds later -
they observed the onset of a collective movement of
the atoms, that is, phonons. This is near the 64
femtosecond period of the fastest lattice
vibrations.

Based on current theory, the researchers
calculated that the lattice spacing rebounded about
6 picometers (10-12 meters) as a result of the
electron jump, consistent with other estimates.

"These results represent a clean example of
attosecond science applied to a complex and
fundamentally important system," Neumark says.

The unprecedented temporal resolution of this
attosecond technology will allow scientists to
resolve extremely brief electronic processes in
solids that to date seemed too fast to be approached
experimentally, says Martin Schultze, who was a
guest researcher in Leone's lab last year, visiting
from the Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat Munchen.

This poses new challenges to the theory of
light-matter interactions, including the excitation
step, its timescale and the interpretation of
experimental x-ray spectra.

"But here is also an advantage," Schultze
adds. "With our ultrashort excitation and probing
pulses, the atoms in the crystal can be considered
frozen during the interaction. That eases the
theoretical treatment a lot."

Beijing, China (SPX) Dec 09, 2014 - Humans have been
experimenting with and utilizing glassy materials
for more than ten millennia, dating back to about
12000 B.C. Although glassy materials are the oldest
known artificial materials, new discoveries and
novel applications continue to appear.

Yet understanding of glass is far from
complete, and the nature of glass constitutes a
longstanding puzzle in condensed mater physics.

In a new overview titled "The B-Relaxation in
Metallic Glasses" and published in the Beijing-based
National Science Review, co-authors Hai Bin Yu and
and Konrad Samwer, based at the Physikalisches
Institut of Gemany's Universitat Gottingen, and Wei
Hua Wang and Hai Yang Bai of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences Institute of Physics in Beijing,
demonstrate that many outstanding issues of glassy
physics and glassy materials are connected with one
relaxation process - the so-called B relaxation or
secondary relaxation.

Focusing on metallic glasses as model systems,
they review the features and mechanisms of B
relaxations, which are intrinsic and universal to
supercooled liquids and glasses. To gain a more
prefect understanding of the nature of B
relaxations, they suggest, computer simulations are
urgently needed.

These scientists likewise demonstrate the
importance of metallic glasses in understanding many
crucial unresolved issues in glassy physics and
material sciences, including glass transition
phenomena, mechanical properties, shear-banding
dynamics and deformation mechanisms, diffusions and
the breakdown of Stokes-Einstein relation, as well
as crystallization and stability of glasses.

While outlining the scientific significance of
each of these areas, the Chinese and German
scientists suggest there are attractive prospects to
incorporating these insights into the design of new
glassy materials with extraordinary properties.

The new study likewise suggests that B
relaxations in metallic glasses could play an
increasingly important role in tailoring the
properties of glassy materials for particular
applications.

Glassy materials (alloys or polymers) with
pronounced B relaxation peaks around room
temperature could be ductile - a property very
desired for mechanical applications. On the other
hand, however, for amorphous medicines, which can be
much better absorbed by humans, B relaxation should
be suppressed or avoided as it can cause
re-crystallization during storage.

Princeton, N.J. (UPI) Dec 5, 2014 - Anyone with a
computer and an Internet connection can now explore
more than 80,000 pages of documents left behind by
the world's most famous physics genius, Albert
Einstein.

The now-complete Digital Einstein project --
the online phase of the Einstein Papers project and
a collaboration between Princeton University Press
and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (to whom the
scientist bequeathed his intellectual legacy) -- is
nearly two decades in the making. Researchers began
sorting through the physicist's letters, papers,
postcards, notebooks and diaries in 1986.

The online documents correspond with a series
of physical books, The Collected Papers of Albert
Einstein, previously released by Princeton
University Press. The more than 5,000 searchable
online documents, available in German and English,
cover Einstein's life through his 1921 Nobel prize
in physics.

"We want to make everything accessible to a
much wider audience than just the scholars,
historians, physicists and philosophers," Diana
Kormos-Buchwald, director of the Einstein Papers
project, told The Guardian. "It's been a challenge
to get all the material online, but I'm extremely
thrilled that we have succeeded."

Additional documents will be uploaded over
time as additional volumes are printed by Princeton.

"We've been working on it for a while, and
we've been thinking about it for a long time,"
Kormos-Buchwald told Inside Higher Education. "Only
now do we have a fantastic colleague like [Princeton
University Press's] Kenneth Reed who could make it
so that it could be standardized and authorized and
correct."

Media
Type: DVD
Published 20-Sep-2010
Published by Koinonia House
KHID#: DVD84

Why do scientists now believe we live in a 10-dimensional universe?

Has physics finally reached the very boundaries of reality?

There seems to be evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it are only ghostly images; projections from a level of reality so beyond our own that the real reality is literally beyond both space and time. The main architect of this astonishing idea is one of the world's most eminent thinkers- physicist David Bohm, a protege of Einstein's. Earlier, he noticed that, in plasmas, particles stopped behaving like individuals and started behaving as if they were part of a larger and inter connected whole. He continued his work in the behavior of oceans of these particles, noting their behaving as if they know what each on the untold trillions of individual particles were doing.

Encoding: This DVD will be viewable in other countries WITH the proper DVD player and television set.Format: Color, Fullscreen Aspect Ratio: 4:3 Audio Encoding: Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo Run Time: 2 hour(s) Number of discs: 1

The Beyond Collection

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Genetics Research Confirms
Biblical Timeline

by Jeffrey
Tomkins, Ph.D. *

Exciting research from the
summer of 2012 described DNA
variation in the protein coding
regions of the human genome
linked to population growth. One
of the investigation's
conclusions was that the human
genome began to rapidly
diversify not more than 5,000
years ago.1,2 This
observation closely agrees with
a biblical timeline of
post-flood human
diversification. Yet another
study, this one published in the
journal Nature,
accessed even more extensive
data and unintentionally
confirmed the recent human
history described in Genesis.3

Differences in human DNA
can be characterized across
populations and ethnic groups
using a variety of techniques.
One of the most informative
genetic technologies in this
regard is the analysis of rare
DNA variation in the protein
coding regions of the genome.
Variability in these regions is
less frequent than the more
numerous genetic differences
that occur in the non-coding
regulatory regions. Researchers
can statistically combine this
information with demographic
data derived from population
growth across the world to
generate time scales related to
human genetic diversification.4

What makes this type of
research unique is that
evolutionary scientists
typically incorporate
hypothetical deep time scales
taken from the authority of
paleontologists or other similar
deep-time scenarios to calibrate
models of genetic change over
time. Demographics-based studies
using observed world population
dynamics do not rely on this
bias and are therefore more
accurate and realistic.

In a 2012 Science
report, geneticists analyzed DNA
sequences of 15,585
protein-coding gene regions in
the human genome for 1,351
European Americans and 1,088
African Americans for rare DNA
variation.1,2 This
new study accessed rare coding
variation in 15,336 genes from
over 6,500 humans—almost three
times the amount of data
compared to the first study.3
A separate group of researchers
performed the new study.

The Nature
results convey a second
spectacular confirmation of the
amazingly biblical conclusions
from the first study. These
scientists confirmed that the
human genome began to rapidly
diversify not more than 5,000
years ago. In addition, they
found significant levels of
variation to be associated with
degradation of the human genome,
not forward evolutionary
progress. This fits closely with
research performed by Cornell
University geneticist John
Sanford who demonstrated through
biologically realistic
population genetic modeling that
genomes actually devolve over
time in a process called genetic
entropy.5

According to the Bible,
the pre-flood world population
was reduced to Noah's three sons
and their wives, creating a
genetic bottleneck from which
all humans descended.
Immediately following the global
flood event, we would expect to
see a rapid diversification
continuing up to the present.
According to Scripture, this
began not more than 5,000 years
ago. We would also expect the
human genome to devolve or
degrade as it accumulates
irreversible genetic errors over
time. Now, two secular research
papers confirm these biblical
predictions.

A
key type of rogue
genetic data called
orphan genes has
just been reported in
honey bees. Orphan genes
conflict with ideas
about genome evolution,
and they are directly
linked with the
evolutionary enigma of
phenotypic novelty,
unique traits specific
to a single type of
creature.

Newly
published research
combining genetic,
language, and
demographic data
challenges the idea of a
single lineage of
languages and human
populations evolving out
of Africa. Instead, the
data supports the idea
that multiple people
groups have independent
origins—a condition one
would predict if the
confusion of languages
at the Tower of Babel
happened as described in
the Bible.

In
March 2014, the BICEP2
radio astronomy team
announced purported
direct evidence of
cosmic inflation, an
important part of the
modern Big Bang model
for the universe’s
creation. This
announcement was
front-page news all over
the world. However,
these scientists
recently submitted a
paper for publication
that effectively
retracts their
breakthrough claim,
acknowledging that their
earlier results were
spurious. They admitted
their “evidence” was
actually an artifact of
dust within our own
galaxy.

It's
an old story. An animal
or plant is discovered
in sedimentary rocks by
paleontologists and it
pushes the organism's
origin further back by
many millions of years.
This time snakes are the
subject of a recent,
unexpected discovery
that pushes their first
appearance back an
additional 65 million
years.

Antibiotics
serve as some of the
most effective tools
modern medicine has to
offer. These amazing
chemicals save many
lives by targeting
specific and essential
processes in pathogenic
bacteria—but antibiotics
are losing their magic
touch. Their failure to
beat back new strains of
antibiotic-resistant
germs motivates
researchers to design or
discover new
antibiotics. Scientists
now reveal reasons why
their new discovery
brings hope to those
hunting for better germ
killers.

On
January 21, 2015 the
news broke—an Australian
fisherman hooked a
"living fossil." Called
the frilled (or frill)
shark, this creature was
thought to be 80 million
years old. It looks
mighty frightening, but
is it truly
"prehistoric" and
somehow linked to shark
evolution?

The
Exodus is one of the
best-known narratives in
the Bible. It details
the Israelites' escape
from Egypt after
centuries of slavery,
Moses' rise to
leadership, the
devastating plagues on
Egypt, and the
miraculous Red Sea
crossing. Yet many
archaeologists and
historians insist there
is no evidence that the
biblical Exodus ever
occurred. This debate is
the subject of the
award-winning
documentary Patterns
of Evidence: Exodus
that has an encore
presentation this
Thursday.

The
big-picture story of
evolution tells that,
over millions of years,
natural processes
produced millions of
species from one or a
few primitive
progenitors. Did this
really happen, or did
God create separate
distinct "kinds" of
creatures about 6,000
years ago like Genesis 1
clearly describes?

In
1995 the Hubble
Telescope photographed
spectacular columns of
gas, illuminated by
nearby stars, in a
section of the Eagle
Nebula. The enormous
columns of gas in this
famous photo have been
nicknamed "pillars of
creation" since secular
scientists insist that
new stars are being
"born" within them.

In
the year 2014, at least
a half dozen fascinating
observations confirmed
the recent creation of
our world and universe.
For example, researchers
took a closer look at
Saturn's moon Enceladus,
finding that it has more
than just the single
known geyser spewing icy
material into space—it
has 101 active geysers.

Every
generation of believers
must settle for itself
the core questions of
ultimate origins. Where
did everything come
from? Can God's account
of beginnings in Genesis
be trusted as actual
history? The year 2014
illustrated that this
generation is still
interested in answers.

Every
year, a few fortunate
paleontologists discover
fossils that closely
resemble living
creatures, and 2014 was
no exception. In fact,
it was a banner year for
finding modern-looking
fossils in what secular
scientist believe to be
very old rocks.

We might learn an
important lesson from a
bit of embarrassment Big
Bang supporters suffered
in 2014. In March,
mainstream media outlets
announced that the
BICEP2 radio astronomy
telescope team
discovered indirect
remains of the Big
Bang's supposed
inflationary period.
Headlines identified
their astronomical
observations as "smoking
gun" evidence for the
Big Bang itself, but it
didn't take long at all
for this smoke to clear.

Slightly
different versions of
water's constituent
elements, hydrogen and
oxygen, are relatively
common in the universe.
But how did Earth's
version of water get
here? European Space
Agency astronomers have
been looking for clues
using their Rosetta
spacecraft to inspect
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Fossils clearly show
that some birds used to
have small teeth, but
most birds today do
not have teeth.
When and how did this
change happen? A new
study in the journal
Science makes a few
unfounded conclusions.

The
Wright brothers studied
wing structures of
seabirds before building
their first airplane,
and the first helicopter
is said to have been
inspired by dragonfly
flight. Today, inventors
continue this tradition,
focusing on bio-inspired
flight sensors. A series
of telling admissions in
a recent summary of
state-of-the-art
research leave no doubt
about the origins of
flight-ready sensors.

If
ancient history
according to Scripture
is true, then what
should we expect to find
in animal fossils?
Surely excellent body
designs would top the
list, closely followed
by a lack of
"transitional forms." A
newly discovered
specialized beetle
inside Indian amber
provides another peek
into the past and an
opportunity to test
these Bible-based
expectations.

The
origin of snake venom
has been a long-time
mystery to both
creationists and
evolutionists.
Interestingly, new
research confirms that
the same genes that
encode snake venom
proteins are active in
many other tissues.

Interest
in human origins
persists generation
after generation, and
researchers continue to
uncover and interpret
clues. The latest set
comes from a
reinvestigation of clam
shells dug up in the
1890s on the Indonesian
island of Java. Someone
skillfully drilled and
engraved those shells.
Who was it?

A
strange, new,
mushroom-shaped species
discovered alive on the
deep seafloor off the
southeastern coast of
Australia may be a
record-breaking living
fossil. It's not a
jellyfish, sea squirt,
or sponge. What is it?

Fossils
seem to tell amazing
stories about ancient
animal life, but close
inspection reveals that
these stories differ
from each other not
because of different
fossils, but because of
different
interpretations. Do the
remarkable circumstances
surrounding a newly
discovered fossil
arthropod tell two
stories or just one?

"We
give You thanks, O Lord
God Almighty, The One
who is and who was and
who is to come, because
You have taken Your
great power and reigned"
(Revelation
11:16-17). This
is the final reference
in the Bible to the
giving of thanks. It
records a scene in
heaven where the 24
elders, representing all
redeemed believers, are
thanking God that His
primeval promise of
restoration and victory
is about to be
fulfilled.

Sunlight
can change in a
heartbeat. One second, a
leaf could be under
intense sun and may
receive more light than
it needs to build sugar
molecules through a
process called
photosynthesis. But a
few seconds later, a
cloud may wander
overhead and block the
sun, starving the
plant's photosynthetic
machinery. A team of
plant biologists
recently discovered new
mechanisms that help
plants cope with these
fast-changing light
conditions.

Genesis
2:9 records one of the
Lord's original
intentions for creating
trees, saying, "Out of
the ground the LORD God
made every tree grow
that is pleasant to the
sight and good for
food." A new study has
quantified just how
pleasant to the sight
trees can be,
inadvertently confirming
the truthfulness of this
ancient biblical
passage.

Based
on journal entries, a
Danish survey team
probably sighted musk
deer while working in
the remote regions of
northeast Afghanistan in
1948, but that was the
last official
sighting—until now. A
new survey team recorded
the species still alive,
but endangered. Seven
similar species found
throughout Asia eat
vegetation, so why do
they need tusks?

Astronomers
recently detected
evidence of possible
comets orbiting a
faraway star system
named β Pictoris. They
compared what they saw
to what our solar system
may have looked like
billions of years ago
when the earth and moon
were supposedly forming
out of a chaotic debris
cloud. But details from
their report easily
refute this imagined
"planetary-system
formation," and instead
illustrate how God
recently and uniquely
created space objects.

How
does it make you feel
when you put forth just
as much effort as the
next guy, but he
receives twice the
reward? Unfair! But how
did people acquire the
sensibilities involved
when assessing fairness?
Certain animals
recognize unequal
rewards too, prompting
researchers to try and
unravel the origins of
fairness.

During
an October 28 meeting of
the Pontifical Academy
of Sciences held in the
Vatican, Pope Francis
claimed that evolution
and the Big Bang do not
contradict the Bible. If
the Pope says it's okay
for Catholics to embrace
naturalistic
explanations, does that
settle the controversy?

When
this article was
written, the number of
West Africans who
contract the deadly
Ebola virus was doubling
about every three and a
half weeks, making it
the worst outbreak of
the disease since the
first recorded
occurrence in 1976.
Where did this virus
come from?

What
are the odds that life
somehow self-generated?
Many experiments have
shown that the
likelihood of just the
right chemicals
combining by chance to
form even the simplest
cell on Earth is so
close to zero that some
origin-of-life
researchers have punted
the possibility to some
distant unknown planet.
But a new study of
gamma-ray burst
frequency estimates has
eliminated the
possibility of life on
other planets.

What
makes sleep so mentally
refreshing? University
of Rochester
neuroscientist Jeff
Iliff addressed the
crowd gathered at a
September 2014 TEDMED
event and explained his
amazing new discoveries.
The words he used
perfectly match what one
would expect while
describing the works of
an ingenious designer.

Giant
clams living in the
Pacific Ocean's
shallow-water tropics
display brilliant,
iridescent colors. Why
do they display such
radiance? Researchers
uncovered five high-tech
specifications that show
how these giant clams
use specialized
iridescent cells to farm
colonies of algae.

Great
pitchers make it look so
easy, and “practice
makes perfect,” but it
helps that the brain
power necessary for
control, neurological
connections, and
muscular arrangements
for the human arm are
exceedingly better than
any system that
exists on the planet. Is
throwing a ball really
that complex?

Scientists
purposefully made mice
sick to test how the
creatures’
intestines—and the
microbes they harbor—would
react. They discovered
details behind a
remarkable relationship
that, when working well,
keeps both parties
healthy.

Few
animal traits are
trotted out as
illustrations of
evolution as often as
the whale’s supposed
vestigial hip bones.
Recent research has
uncovered new details
about the critical
function of these whale
hips—details that
undermine this key
evolutionary argument
and confirm divine
design.

Jurassic
mammals made headlines
recently, as Chinese
paleontologists
described six tiny
skeletons comprising
three new species. The
squirrel-like fossils
break the long-held idea
that most so-called
"dinosaur-era" mammals
resembled shrews. These
newfound mammals look
like they lived in
trees—not underground
like shrews. Do the new
fossils help
evolutionists clarify
their story for the
origin of mammals, or do
they crank more twists
into evolution's
troubled saga?

A
fossil group of alleged
evolutionary human
ancestors called
australopithecines—all
quite ape-like in their
features—have
traditionally been
uncooperative as
transitional forms. Now
the famous Taung child,
a supposed example of
early transitional skull
features, has been
debunked.

New fossil finds further
verify one of
evolution's biggest
problems: the Cambrian
explosion. According to
evolutionary reckoning,
a massive explosion of
new life supposedly
spawned dozens of
brand-new fully formed
body plans about 530
million years ago.
Details from a newly
described Canadian
fossil fish intensify
this Cambrian conundrum.

One-cell
creatures called
ciliates are
expanding the concept of
genome complexity at an
exponential rate. Now a
newly sequenced ciliate
genome reveals
unimaginable levels of
programmed rearrangement
combined with an
ingenious system of
encryption.

Secular
astrophysicists often
talk about “primordial
nucleosynthesis” as
though it were a proven
historical event. In
theory, it describes how
certain conditions
during an early Big Bang
universe somehow cobbled
together the first
elements. But no
historical evidence
corroborates this
primordial
nucleosynthesis, an idea
beset by a theoretical
barrier called the
“lithium problem.”
Secular scientists
recently put this
problem to a practical
test.

Social
psychologists are
tracking IQ scores and
noticed a decline in the
last decade after a
steady rise since the
1950s. Some wonder if
the recent downturn
reflects genes that have
been eroding all along.
Are we evolving
stupidity?

Discoveries
of DNA sequences that
contain different
languages, each one with
multiple purposes, are
utterly defying
evolutionary
predictions. What was
once hailed as redundant
code is proving to be
key in protein
production.

Scientists
described a new and
remarkable fossil
skeleton of a giant
titanosaur, a group that
includes the largest
creatures ever to have
lived on land. Because
this specimen is nearly
45 percent complete, it
gives more details than
any other fossil of its
kind, as well as some
details that confirm the
biblical creation model.

The
origin of snake venom
has long been a mystery
to both creationists and
evolutionists. However,
by stepping outside the
standard research
paradigm, scientists
recently showed that
snake venom proteins may
have arisen from
existing salivary
proteins, supporting the
idea that they arose
post-Fall through
modification of existing
features.

Authentic
speciation is a process
whereby organisms
diversify within the
boundaries of their gene
pools, and this can
result in variants with
specific ecological
adaptability. While it
was once thought that
this process was
strictly facilitated by
DNA sequence
variability, Darwin's
classic example of
speciation in finches
now includes a
surprisingly strong
epigenetic component as
well.

An
octopus can change the
color of its skin at
will to mimic any kind
of surrounding. It
actively camouflages
itself with astoundingly
complicated biological
machinery. Wouldn't it
be great if, say, a
soldier's uniform or an
armored vehicle used
similar technology?

The
case for Neandertals as
more primitive members
of an evolutionary
continuum that spans
from apes to modern man
continues to weaken.
Genetic and
archaeological finds are
completely reshaping
modern concepts of
Neandertal men and
women.

The
Dallas Morning News
recently reported that a
group of Ph.D.
scientists is swimming
upstream against the
scientific community.
Instead of believing in
millions of years of
evolution, the team at
the Institute for
Creation Research dares
to suggest that science
confirms biblical
creation's view of a
world only thousands of
years old. And there's
more to the story.

A
recent article in
The Dallas Morning News
and a follow-up NBC
interview presented some
history and touched on
the tenets of the
Institute for Creation
Research. Both news
reports sparked
inquiries from readers
and viewers. For
example, some are now
asking, "What defines
credible scientific
research?"

Secular
scientists claimed in
the 1970s that chimp
genomes are 98% similar
to humans, and it was
apparently verified by
more modern techniques.
But that estimate
actually used isolated
segments of DNA that we
already share with
chimps—not the whole
genomes. The latest
comparison that included
all of the two species’
DNA revealed a huge
difference from the
percentage scientists
have been claiming for
years.

Discover
the
cosmos!
Each
day
a
different
image
or
photograph
of
our
fascinating
universe

DVD

PRICE R 159.00

Transhumanism is an
international intellectual
and cultural movement
supporting the use of
science and technology to
improve human mental and
physical characteristics and
capacities.

by
Dr. Martin Erdmann

The human species can, if it wishes,
transcend itself. We need a name for this new belief.
Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but
transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and
for his human nature.
Julian Huxley
1st director of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
(wrote nearly fifty years ago)
Transhumanism is a word that is
beginning to bubble to the top of our prophetic studies and
horizon. Simply described, transhumanism is an international
intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of
science and technology to improve human mental and physical
characteristics and capacities - in essence, to create a "posthuman"
society.
This is not a passing fad.
Transhumanist programs are sponsored in institutions such as
Oxford, Standford, and Caltech. Sponsorships come from
organizations such as Ford, Apple, Intel, Xerox, Sun
Microsystems, and others. DARPA, Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, a technical department within the U.S.
Department of Defense is also involved in transhumanist
projects.
This briefing pack contains 2 hours
of teachings
Available in the following formats
DVD:
1 Disc
2 M4A Files
More Info

The
Origins of Information: Exploring and Explaining
Biological Information

In the 21st century, the information age has
finally come to biology. We now know that biology at its
root is comprised of information rich systems, such as the
complex digital code encoded in DNA. Groundbreaking
discoveries of the past decade are revealing the information
bearing properties of biological systems.

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, a Cambridge trained philosopher of
science is examining and explaining the amazing depth of
digital technology found in each and every living cell such
as nested coding, digital processing, distributive retrieval
and storage systems, and genomic operating systems.

Meyer is developing a more fundamental argument for
intelligent design that is based not on a single feature
like the bacterial flagellum, but rather on a pervasive
feature of all living systems. Alongside matter and energy,
Dr. Meyer shows that there is a third fundamental entity in
the universe needed for life: information.

Many scientists say
complex life just randomly happened.
Primordial soup + lightning strike = Bingo! Is there
any shred of scientific evidence that life was CREATED as
Genesis 1 claims? Dr. Stephen Meyer, author of SIGNATURE
IN THE CELL, says not a shred. Rather, a ton. Learn good
reasoning techniques here.

This article was originally
published in the Daily
Telegraph (UK) on January
29.
Original Article In 2004,
the distinguished philosopher
Antony Flew of the University of
Reading made worldwide news when
he repudiated a lifelong
commitment to atheism and
affirmed the reality of some
kind of a creator. Flew cited
evidence of intelligent design
in DNA and the arguments of
"American [intelligent] design
theorists" as important reasons
for this shift. Since then,
British readers have learnt
about the theory of intelligent
design (ID) mainly from media
reports about United States
court battles over the legality
of teaching students about it.
According to most reports, ID is
a "faith-based" alternative to
evolution based solely on
religion. But is this accurate?
As one of the architects of the
theory, I know it isn't.
Contrary to media reports, ID is
not a religious-based idea, but
an evidence-based scientific
theory about life's origins.
According to Darwinian
biologists such as Oxford
University's Richard Dawkins,
living systems "give the
appearance of having been
designed for a purpose". But,
for modern Darwinists, that
appearance of design is
illusory, because the purely
undirected process of natural
selection acting on random
mutations is entirely sufficient
to produce the intricate
designed-like structures found
in living organisms. By
contrast, ID holds that there
are tell-tale features of living
systems and the universe that
are best explained by a
designing intelligence. The
theory does not challenge the
idea of evolution defined as
change over time, or even common
ancestry, but it disputes
Darwin's idea that the cause of
biological change is wholly
blind and undirected. What signs
of intelligence do design
advocates see? In recent years,
biologists have discovered an
exquisite world of
nanotechnology within living
cells - complex circuits,
sliding clamps,
energy-generating turbines and
miniature machines. For example,
bacterial cells are propelled by
rotary engines called flagellar
motors that rotate at
100,000rpm. These engines look
like they were designed by
engineers, with many distinct
mechanical parts (made of
proteins), including rotors,
stators, O-rings, bushings,
U-joints and drive shafts. The
biochemist Michael Behe points
out that the flagellar motor
depends on the co-ordinated
function of 30 protein parts.
Remove one of these proteins and
the rotary motor doesn't work.
The motor is, in Behe's words,
"irreducibly complex". This
creates a problem for the
Darwinian mechanism. Natural
selection preserves or "selects"
functional advantages as they
arise by random mutation. Yet
the flagellar motor does not
function unless all its 30 parts
are present. Thus, natural
selection can "select" the motor
once it has arisen as a
functioning whole, but it cannot
produce the motor in a
step-by-step Darwinian fashion.
Natural selection purportedly
builds complex systems from
simpler structures by preserving
a series of intermediates, each
of which must perform some
function. With the flagellar
motor, most of the critical
intermediate structures perform
no function for selection to
preserve. This leaves the origin
of the flagellar motor
unexplained by the mechanism -
natural selection - that Darwin
specifically proposed to replace
the design hypothesis. Is there
a better explanation? Based on
our uniform experience, we know
of only one type of cause that
produces irreducibly complex
systems: intelligence. Whenever
we encounter complex systems -
whether integrated circuits or
internal combustion engines -
and we know how they arose,
invariably a designing
intelligence played a role.
Consider an even more
fundamental argument for design.
In 1953, when Watson and Crick
elucidated the structure of the
DNA molecule, they made a
startling discovery. Strings of
precisely sequenced chemicals
called nucleotides in DNA store
and transmit the assembly
instructions - the information -
in a four-character digital code
for building the protein
molecules the cell needs to
survive. Crick then developed
his "sequence hypothesis", in
which the chemical bases in DNA
function like letters in a
written language or symbols in a
computer code. As Dawkins has
noted, "the machine code of the
genes is uncannily
computer-like". The
informational features of the
cell at least appear designed.
Yet, to date, no theory of
undirected chemical evolution
has explained the origin of the
digital information needed to
build the first living cell.
Why? There is simply too much
information in the cell to be
explained by chance alone. The
information in DNA (and RNA) has
also been shown to defy
explanation by forces of
chemical necessity. Saying
otherwise would be like saying a
headline arose as the result of
chemical attraction between ink
and paper. Clearly, something
else is at work. DNA functions
like a software program. We know
from experience that software
comes from programmers. We know
that information - whether, say,
in hieroglyph